The Local Horizon of Ancient Greek Religion [New ed.] 1009301845, 9781009301848

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title page
Copyright information
Contents
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Preface
List of Abbreviations
1 Localism and the Study of Ancient Greek Religion: The Example of the Divine Persona
Introduction
The Problem of the Unity and Diversity of Ancient Greek Divinity
Localism and the Divine Persona: Debates and Positions
The Local as the Realisation of the Universal
The Local as the Place at Which Variation Occurs
The Local and the Universal as Ubiquitous and Intersecting Categories
Placing Religion between the Local and the General
Conclusion
Bibliography
2 Refitting the Local Horizon of Ancient Greek Religion (Including Some Remarks on the Sanctuary of Poseidon on Kalaureia)
The Local Horizon: Signifier and Source of Religious Meaning
The Sanctuary of Poseidon at Kalaureia and the Saronic Region: Sails and Scales
Conclusion
Bibliography
3 Mycenaean Greek Worship in Minoan Territory
The Mycenaeans in Place: The Foundations of Greek Religion
A Historiographical Perspective
The Minoans and the Mycenaeans: Distinct Ideological Systems
The Helladic Roots of Mycenaean Religion
Within Minoan Territory: The Effects of a New Place on Mycenaean Religion
Upheaval on Crete and a New Power Base at Knossos
Early Days at Knossos: Harking back to the Mainland
Settling in and Transforming the New Place into Home
The Force of Local Horizons
Bibliography
4 Hera on Samos: Between the Global and the Local
The Name
The Myths
The Toneia
Heraia
Worshipping Hera on Samos
Conclusions
Bibliography
5 Polytheism and the Distribution of Votives in the Corinthia
Poseidon at Isthmia
Hera at Perachora
Demeter and Kore on Acrocorinth
Votives and Wealth
Votives and Practicality of Location
Votives and Gender
Votives and Deity
An Alternative Model: 'Raw' and 'Converted'
The Miniature and the Monumental
Conclusions
Appendix: Tables and Charts
Bibliography
6 Demeter Chthonia at Hermione: Landscapes and Cult
Introduction
Localisation, 'Landscapes', and their Interaction with the Divine Persona
Hermione: Polis and Chora, Topography and Character
Local Factors in the Cult of Demeter Chthonia
Demeter Chthonia Outside of Hermione
Bibliography
7 Local Variation in the Thesmophoria Festival: A Case Study of the Attic and Sicilian Thesmophoria Festivals
Introduction
The 'Universal' Reconstruction of the Thesmophoria Festival
The Attic Thesmophoria
The Sicilian Thesmophoria
Similarities and Differences between the Attic and Sicilian Thesmophoria Festivals
The Local and the Universal in the Attic and Sicilian Thesmophoria Festivals
Conclusion
Bibliography
8 The Lindian Chronicle and Local Identity
Introduction: Local Religion and Global Pressure
Which Rhodes?
The Lindian Chronicle and the Tangible Past
Archives and Intentional History
Cities and Tribes
Spatium Mythicum and Spatium Historicum
The Association Habit
What Really Matters
Bibliography
9 Shifting Identities and Defensive Localism: Conflicts of Religious Narratives in Post-Synoikism Rhodes
Introduction
'All for One and One for All': The Rhodian Synoikism and its Aftermath
Lindian First, Rhodian Second?
Lindian Identity and Peraian Pariahs
Inclusivity and Exclusivity in Local Discourse
Recasting Lindian Identity in Sacred Space
Conclusion
Appendix: TRI 22 (cf. IG XII 1, 761)
Bibliography
10 Between Local and Global? Religion in Late-Hellenistic Delos
Local Religion
Translocal Cults
Global Cults in Delian Local Religion
Conclusions
Bibliography
11 Personal or Communal? Social Horizons of Local Greek Religion
Inheriting and 'Opting In': Ancestral Cults and New Introductions
Private Foundations in Public Places: The Initiative of Citizens
Xenokrateia of Athens Sets Up a Shrine of Kephisos
Introduction of the Cult of Pan to Attica
Failed Cult Introduction - Kleisthenes Introduces Melanippos to Sikyon
Private Foundations in Public Places: The Initiative of Foreign Residents
Archedamos of Thera and the Shrine at the Vari Cave
Xenophon's Sanctuary of Artemis at Skillous
'Local' and 'More Local': Spatial and Social Complications
Lessons from Ethno-archaeology: A 'Local' Cult of Buried Icons on Naxos
Concluding Thoughts
Bibliography
12 How to Write a Local History of Imperial Greek Cults: Observations from Pausanias
Introduction
The Localism of Pausanias' Periegesis
Obscured Ritual Relationships in the Architecture of the Periegesis
Conclusion
Bibliography
13 Panhellenic Sanctuaries: Local and Regional Perspectives
The Polis-Centred Dimensions
Beyond the Poleis and the Ethne: The Panhellenic Perspective
Different, but Entangled Spheres
Conclusion
Bibliography
Epilogue: A Tribute to Potnia of the Labyrinth
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The Local Horizon of Ancient Greek Religion

Which dimensions of the religious experience of the ancient Greeks become tangible only if we foreground their local horizon? This book explores the manifold ways in which Greek religious beliefs and practices are encoded in and communicate with various local environments. Its individual chapters explore ‘the local’ in its different forms and formulations. Besides the polis perspective, they include numerous other places and locations above and below the polis level, as well as those fully or largely independent of the citystate. Overall, the local emerges as a relational concept that changes together with our understanding of the general or universal forces as they shape ancient Greek religion. The unity and diversity of ancient Greek religion becomes tangible in the various ways in which localising and generalising forces interact with each other at different times and in different places across the ancient Greek world.

  is Professor and Chair of Greek History at Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster and Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Arts at McGill University, Montréal. He has published widely on the history and culture of ancient Greece, including Localism and the Ancient Greek City-State (2020), Federalism in Greek Antiquity (jointly edited with P. Funke, Cambridge, 2015) and A Companion to Ancient Greek Government (edited, 2013). He is the co-editor of Hermes and Hermes Einzelschriften, and of the series Antiquity in Global Context (Cambridge). Among other distinctions, Hans Beck is the recipient of the German Humboldt Foundation’s Anneliese Maier Research Prize, an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a corresponding member of the German Archaeological Institute.

  is Professor of Ancient History in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Sydney, and a Future Fellow of the Australian Research Council (2018–22). Her publications include Rethinking Greek Religion (Cambridge, 2012), Revisiting Delphi: Religion and Storytelling in Ancient Greece (Cambridge, 2016), Animals in Ancient Greek Religion (2020, edited), The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Greek Religion (2015, jointly edited with E. Eidinow), and Theologies of Ancient Greek Religion (Cambridge, 2016, jointly edited with R. Osborne and E. Eidinow). She is an elected fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and member of the editorial board of the Journal of Ancient History and Antichthon, and Senior Editor of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religions (ORE).

The Local Horizon of Ancient Greek Religion Edited by

  Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Germany

  The University of Sydney, Australia

Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8EA, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009301848 DOI: 10.1017/9781009301862 © Cambridge University Press & Assessment 2023 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published 2023 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. A Cataloging-in-Publication data record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-1-009-30184-8 Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of Figures [page vii] List of Contributors [ix] Preface [xiii] List of Abbreviations [xv]

1 Localism and the Study of Ancient Greek Religion: The Example of the Divine Persona [1]  

2 Refitting the Local Horizon of Ancient Greek Religion (Including Some Remarks on the Sanctuary of Poseidon on Kalaureia) [28]  

3 Mycenaean Greek Worship in Minoan Territory [67]  

4 Hera on Samos: Between the Global and the Local [105]  . 

5 Polytheism and the Distribution of Votives in the Corinthia [141]  

6 Demeter Chthonia at Hermione: Landscapes and Cult [183]  

7 Local Variation in the Thesmophoria Festival: A Case Study of the Attic and Sicilian Thesmophoria Festivals [205]  . . 

8 The Lindian Chronicle and Local Identity [232]  

9 Shifting Identities and Defensive Localism: Conflicts of Religious Narratives in Post-Synoikism Rhodes [262]  

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10 Between Local and Global? Religion in Late-Hellenistic Delos [290]  

11 Personal or Communal? Social Horizons of Local Greek Religion [312]  

12 How to Write a Local History of Imperial Greek Cults: Observations from Pausanias [342]  

13 Panhellenic Sanctuaries: Local and Regional Perspectives  

Epilogue: A Tribute to Potnia of the Labyrinth [376]  

Index

[387]

[362]

Figures

1.1 Apollo and Tityos. Attic red-figure calyx-krater [page 10] 2.1 The Saronic Gulf: natural environment and major sites in the Classical Age [45] 2.2 Kalaureia, view from the plateau north toward the natural harbour [47] 2.3 Late Archaic reorganisation of sacred space: site map detailing the south-eastern corner of the peribolos wall of the Temple of Poseidon and the find-spot of Archaic column drums discovered during the 2007–09 excavation programme [50] 2.4 The local horizon of Troizen: terrestrial and marine contiguity [58] 3.1 Plan of Knossos, with the central court as its focus [71] 3.2 Grandstand Fresco (after a wall painting at Knossos, Heraklion Archaeological Museum) [73] 3.3 Plan of Pylos, with the megaron complex as its focus [75] 3.4 Reconstruction of the fresco from the throne room at Pylos depicting the lyre player and men feasting [76] 3.5 Hand-to-hand combat scenes depicted in frescos from Hall 64 at Pylos [77] 3.6 (a) Combat agate from the Griffin Warrior’s shaft grave at Pylos; (b) drawing of the scene depicted on the combat agate [83] 3.7 The Hagia Triada sarcophagus: (a) side a showing two processions; (b) side b showing the sacrificed bull and a priestess at an altar; (c) the two short sides showing two scenes of chariots driven by women, one drawn by horses or agrimi; (d) the other by gryphons [95] 5.1 Map of the Corinthia [143] 5.2 Illyrian-type helmet from the Sanctuary of Poseidon at Isthmia, ca. 680–550 BCE [145] 5.3 Terracotta figurine of horse and female rider from the Sanctuary of Hera at Perachora, ca. 550 BCE [149] 5.4 Terracotta koulouria fragments from the Sanctuary of Hera at Perachora, 7th century BCE [149] 5.5 Likna and offering trays from the Sanctuary of Demeter and Kore on Acrocorinth, late Archaic/Classical period [151]

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List of Figures

5.6 Kalathiskoi from the Sanctuary of Demeter and Kore on Acrocorinth, 5th century BCE [152] 8.1 Arrangement of text on the Lindian Temple Chronicle [237] 8.2 The geography of the Lindian Chronicle [249] 10.1 Sanctuaries on Mount Kynthos, Delos [295] 10.2 Serapeion C, Delos [302] 10.3 Dromos and Naos C in Serapeion C, Delos [304]

Contributors

Hans Beck is Professor and Chair of Greek History at Münster University and Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Arts at McGill University Montreal. He has published widely on the history and culture of ancient Greece, including Localism and the Ancient Greek City-State (Chicago, Ill. 2020), Federalism in Greek Antiquity (jointly edited with P. Funke, Cambridge 2015) and A Companion to Ancient Greek Government (edited, Oxford 2013). He is the co-editor of Hermes and Hermes Einzelschriften, and of the series Antiquity in Global Context. Among other distinctions, Hans Beck is the recipient of the German Humboldt Foundation’s Anneliese Maier Research Prize, an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a corresponding member of the German Archaeological Institute. Corinne Bonnet is Professor of Greek History at the University of Toulouse – Jean Jaurès. She is Principal Investigator of the ERC Advanced Grant Mapping Ancient Polytheisms (2017–23). With an international team she deals with the way ancient Mediterranean societies, mainly Greek and Semitic, named their gods, using variable onomastic sequences shaped by social agents in specific environments. The MAP database, with more than 10,000 onomastic testimonies, is a major (and ongoing) achievement of the project (https://base-map-polytheisms.huma-num.fr). Bonnet has published several books and articles on the history of religions in antiquity, with a particular interest in multi-cultural contexts. She has also studied the history of scholarship on antiquity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially through the rich archives and correspondence of Franz Cumont. She recently published, with her ERC team, Noms de dieux. Portraits de divinités antiques and, with Gabriella Pironti, Les dieux d’Homère III. Attributs onomastiques, both in 2021. Jan N. Bremmer is Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies of the University of Groningen. He has published widely on religion in the ancient world and its study in modern times. His latest books are Maidens, Magic and Martyrs in Early Christianity (Tübingen 2017), The World of Greek Religion and Mythology (Tübingen 2019), Greek Religion (second edition, Cambridge

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2021), and Becoming a Man in Ancient Greece and Rome (Tübingen 2021). Among his many (co-)edited books are Marginality, Media, and Mutations of Religious Authority in the History of Christianity (Leuven 2019, jointly edited with L. Feldt) and The Apostles Peter, Paul, John, Thomas and Philip with their Companions in Late Antiquity (Leuven 2021, jointly edited with T. Nicklas and J. Spittler). Diana Burton is Senior Lecturer in the Classics Programme at Victoria University of Wellington. She has published on Greek art, iconography, religion, and death, and the interactions between these areas. She has also published on classical reception, and is the joint editor of Athens to Aotearoa: Greece and Rome in New Zealand Literature and Society (Wellington 2017, with S. Perris and W. J. Tatum). She is the co-editor of Antichthon. Peter Funke is Senior Professor of Ancient History and Member of the Cluster of Excellence ‘Religion and Politics’ at Münster University. From 2011 to 2017 he was a member of the Central Directorate of the German Archaeological Institute (DAI) in Berlin. Since 2020, he has been the head of the academic advisory board of the Athens Department of the DAI. He has also been project director of the Inscriptiones Graecae at the BerlinBrandenburg Academy since 2008; from 2004 to 2008, Chairman of the German Association of Historians; and from 2010 to 2016, Vice President of the German Research Foundation (DFG). The focus of his research is the political history of Greece from the Archaic to the Hellenistic periods, ancient institutions and interstate relations, and the historical geography of ancient Greece. He is the author and co-editor of many books, including Athen in klassischer Zeit (fourth edition, Munich 2019) and Federalism in Greek Antiquity (co-edited with H. Beck, Cambridge 2015). Greta Hawes is Associate Professor and ARC Future Fellow at Macquarie University and Research Associate in Greek Myth at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C. She is the author of Pausanias in the World of Greek Myth (Oxford 2021) and Rationalizing Myth in Antiquity (Oxford 2014), editor of Myths on the Map (Oxford 2017), and co-director of the digital initiatives MANTO and Canopos. She currently serves as commissioning editor for Classical Review. Julia Kindt is Professor of Ancient History in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Sydney and an ARC Future Fellow. Her publications include Rethinking Greek Religion (Cambridge 2012), Revisiting Delphi: Religion and Storytelling in Ancient Greece

List of Contributors

(Cambridge 2016), Animals in Ancient Greek Religion (edited, London 2020), The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Greek Religion (jointly edited with E. Eidinow, Oxford 2015), and Theologies of Ancient Greek Religion (jointly edited with R. Osborne and E. Eidinow, Cambridge 2016). She is a member of the editorial board of The Journal of Ancient History, Antichthon, and Sydney University Press, and Senior Editor of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religions (ORE). Susan Lupack is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University, investigating the religion, economy, and society of the Aegean Bronze Age. Her recent publications appear in Collapse and Transformation: The Late Bronze Age to Early Iron Age in the Aegean (Oxford 2020) and The Routledge Companion to Ecstatic Experience in the Ancient World (London 2021), and she co-edited the Cambridge Guide to Homer (Cambridge 2020, lead editor C. Pache). She is also an active field archaeologist who co-directed the Eastern Boeotia Archaeological Project (2007–12), and who, with P. Kasimi, recently established the Perachora Peninsula Archaeological Project. Jeremy McInerney is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Folds of Parnassos (Austin Tex. 1999), a book on state formation in Archaic Greece, and The Cattle of the Sun (Princeton N.J. 2010), a book dealing with the importance of cattle in the culture of Ancient Greece. He is the editor of A Companion to Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean (Malden Mass. 2014) and co-editor (with I. Sluiter) of Landscapes of Value: Natural Environment and Cultural Imagination in Classical Antiquity (Leiden 2016). In 2018 his new history of Ancient Greece, entitled Greece in the Ancient World (London and New York N.Y.), was published. He has recently published a series of studies dealing with Hephaistos, his temple at Athens, the Hephaisteion, as well as Athenian relations with the god’s island home, Lemnos. His current research is focused on the function of hybridity in Greek culture. Katherine R. L. McLardy is an independent researcher in Melbourne, Australia who is working on interdisciplinary analyses re-examining the Classical evidence for ancient women’s festivals. Her current research focuses on refining the reconstruction of the Thesmophoria and Adonia festivals across a variety of local contexts. She is particularly interested in the role of local variation for contextualising these festivals and in exploring the lived experience of these festivals for the women who celebrated them.

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Tulsi Parikh is A. G. Leventis Post-Doctoral Fellow at the British School at Athens. She is also an affiliated researcher in the Faculty of Classics at the University of Cambridge, where she completed her doctoral thesis: The Material of Polytheism in Archaic Greece: Understanding Greek Religion through Patterns of Dedicatory Practice and Thought, ca. 750–480 BCE (2020). Her research interests include the art and archaeology of Greek religion, ancient mobility in relation to sacred space and landscape, and the materiality of ancient thought and belief. Irene Polinskaya is Reader in Ancient History at King’s College London. Her research addresses the social and religious history of ancient Greece and Greek epigraphy (including digital databases), with particular focus on the regions of the Saronic Gulf and north-western Black Sea. Her publications include A Local History of Greek Polytheism: Gods, People, and the Land of Aigina, 800–400 BCE (Leiden 2013), ΜΙΚΡΟΣ ΙΕΡΟΜΝΗΜΩΝ. Studies in Honor of Michael H. Jameson (co-edited with A. P. Matthaiou, Athens 2008), and Curses in Context: The Greek Curse Tablets of the Classical and Hellenistic Periods. Papers and Monographs from the Norwegian Institute at Athens, vol. 11 (co-edited with C. A. Faraone, Athens 2021). She is the co-director (with A. Ivantchik) and English editor of Inscriptions of the Northern Black Sea: New IOSPE. Julietta Steinhauer is Associate Professor at University College London. Julietta’s research focuses mainly on religion, migration and gender. Her publications include Religious Associations in the Post-Classical Polis (Stuttgart 2014) and several articles on the religion of minorities, gender, and social history in the Hellenistic and Roman Aegean. In 2018 she was a Visiting Fellow at the Max Weber Centre and in 2021 a WiRe Fellow at the University of Münster. Juliane Zachhuber is a Fellow by Special Election in Ancient History at Wadham College, University of Oxford. Prior to this she held lectureships at the University of Reading, and Oriel College and Jesus College, Oxford. Her research interests include religion, epigraphy, politics, and society in the Classical and Hellenistic Greek world. Her work has been published in the journal Kernos (2018), and a contribution is in press in an edited volume on Cult in the Dodecanese. The monograph she is currently completing will be entitled Religion and Society in Classical and Hellenistic Rhodes (forthcoming).

Preface

Ancient Greek religion has traditionally been thought to manifest itself in both a local and a panhellenic dimension. While the latter involved the notion of universality and was associated above all with the sanctuaries of Olympia and Delphi, as well as with the Homeric tradition, the former was largely equated with the polis as the basic unit in which ancient Greek religion expressed itself. If other (regional, individual) perspectives came into focus, they did so mostly as an extension of the kind of mediatory function that the polis had in the ancient Greek world. More recently, however, there has been an upsurge of scholarly interest in diversifying our understanding of ancient Greek religion. In the wake of the criticism of the polis model for the study of ancient Greek religion, classical scholars have explored alternative locations of the religious besides those demarcated by the polis. Scholars have pointed to the manifold ways in which religion was embedded in place, landscape, and the natural world more widely than the political structures of the ancient Greek city-state. At the same time, new conceptual work on localism and the local in classical studies and beyond has provided new insights into the lived experience in the ancient Greek world. ‘Local’ has long been understood as small-scale, confined in size and relevance, with little if any bearing on greater cultural currencies. The label has thus been used typically in a pejorative sense to describe low-key knowledge systems, underdeveloped artistic styles, or cultural practices that were out of sync with more dynamic constellations. Against reductionist images of social slow motion or seclusion, recent research highlights the foundational quality of the local. Dynamic, fast-changing, and multicoded, the ‘new local’ is a frame of reference that lends normativity to human agency, a domain of meaning and purpose, and a feeder of connected cultural processes. This book combines both research axes. Its overall aim is to illustrate the manifold ways in which religious belief and practice are encoded in and in communication with the local environment. To this end, conceptions of the local at work in the individual chapters necessarily range widely. Besides the polis perspective, they include numerous other places and locations above and below the polis-level, or fully or largely independent

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of it. The reason for this is that the local itself is a relational concept; the way classical scholars make use of it changes together with their conceptions of the general or universal. Throughout this study, the local emerges as a quantity in its own right, as a sphere of religious conduct that allows for the exercise of religion in ancient Greece in interaction with generalising or universalising forces. In all instances we have asked authors to speak to the specific question of how the local comes into the picture in their contribution. The result is a collection of chapters exploring the local horizon of ancient Greek religion as it transpires in both the literary and the material evidence in different parts of the Greek world and at different points in time. At the same time, these studies come together in disclosing the creative tension and vibrant cross-fertilisation between the local sphere, on the one hand, and general, universal, or panhellenic paradigms on the other. Each chapter is preceded by a brief preface written by the editors that introduces its approach, explains where it is situated in the volume, and maps its argument as the conversation between chapters unfolds. Taken together, the contributions to this book illustrate, we hope, the productivity of an approach that is appreciative of the local’s inherent quality to fuse Greek religion with structure and meaning. Many people and institutions lent their support to this truly collaborative endeavour. We thank the Centre of Classical and Near Eastern Studies (CCANESA) at Sydney University for hosting an initial conference, the Faculty of Arts at Sydney University for awarding us a Nicholas Anthony Aaroney Research Grant, and the Australian Research Council (ARC). In addition, we are grateful for matching funds received by the Anneliese Maier Research Prize awarded to Hans Beck by the German Humboldt Foundation and the John MacNaughton Chair of Classics at McGill University in Montreal, which he held at the time. In Münster, the Cluster of Excellence Religion and Politics (project B3–40 Localism and Religion in Ancient Greece) provided a congenial environment for the key process of synthesising the project and bringing the contributions to this book into what we hope has become an organic whole. Thanks are also due to Greta Hawes for her help with the index, to Daniel Hanigan and Emma Barlow for their assistance in organising the conference in Sydney, and to Edward Armstrong, Lukas Duisen, and Daniel Hagen for their help with the manuscript. Hans Beck, Münster Julia Kindt, Sydney

Abbreviations

The names and texts of classical authors as well as scholarly journal titles are abbreviated according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD), 4th edition. General

ERC KN LAR LM MAP Project PY

European Research Council Knossos Lived Ancient Religions Late Minoan Mapping Ancient Polytheisms Project Pylos

Reference works

AHD BNJ CGRN DK FGrH HE ID IG IGASMG II2 I. Magnesia I.Lindos IosPE IScM III

R. Vallois, L’architecture hellénique et hellénistique à Délos jusqu’à l’éviction des Déliens (166 av. J.-C.). Paris 1944. I. Worthington (ed.), Brill’s New Jacoby. 2006–. Corpus of Greek Ritual Norms. H. Diels and W. Kranz, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 6th edn. Berlin 1952. F. Jacoby, Fragmente der griechischen Historiker. 1923–. A. S. F. Gow and D. L. Page (eds.), The Greek Anthology. Hellenistic Epigrams. Cambridge 1965. F. Dürrbach (ed.), Inscriptions of Delos. 1923–37. Inscriptiones Graecae R. Arena (ed.), Iscrizioni Greche Arcaiche di Sicilia e Magna Grecia II: Iscrizioni di Gela e Agrigento. Alessandria 2002. O. Kern (ed.), Die Inschriften von Magnesia am Maeander. Berlin 1900. C. S. Blinkenberg and K. F. Kinch (eds.), Lindos. Fouilles et recherches, 1902–1914, vol. II: Inscriptions. Berlin 1941. Ancient Inscriptions of the Northern Black Sea. A. Avram (ed.), Inscriptions grecques et latines de Scythie Mineure, III Callatis et son territoire. Bucarest and Paris 1999.

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I. Thess. LC LSAM LSCG LSJ OCD4 RE RICIS SEG SIG Syll.3 TRI

J.-C. Decourt, Inscriptions de Thessalie, vol. 1: Les cités de la vallée de l’Énipeus. 1995–. C. Higbie, The Lindian Chronicle and the Greek Creation of their Past. Oxford 2003. F. Sokolowski, Lois sacrées de l’Asie Mineure. Paris 1955. F. Sokolowski, Lois sacrées des cités grecques. Paris 1969. H. G. Liddell and R. Scott, Greek–English Lexicon, 9th edn., rev. H. Stuart-Jones, suppl. E. A. Barber et al. Oxford 1968. The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th edn. A. Pauly, G. Wissowa, and W. Kroll (eds.), RealEncyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft. 1893–. L. Bricault, Recueil des inscriptions concernant les cultes isiaques, 3 vols. Paris 2005. Supplementum epigraphicum Graecum. 1923–. see Syll.3 W. Dittenberger, Sylloge Inscriptionum Graecarum, 3rd edn. 1915–24. N. Badoud, ‘Catalogue des inscriptions’, Le Temps de Rhodes. Munich 2015, 305–453.

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Localism and the Study of Ancient Greek Religion: The Example of the Divine Persona  

Julia Kindt’s chapter explores the way in which the local dimension of ancient Greek religion has featured in Classical scholarship from the beginnings of the discipline to the present. A particular focus is on the way in which the categories of the local and the general have featured in the study of the ancient Greek gods and goddesses. Kindt argues that the problem of location is intrinsic to the structure of ancient Greek religion, which, in the absence of traditional locations of authority, had multiple centres and peripheries. The way in which the Greeks conceived of the personalities of the gods and goddesses is a case in point: the idea of a unified existence as implied in the concept of the divine persona is challenged by the multiplicity of ways in which one and the same deity manifested itself in the human world. Three different ways in which Classical scholars have conceived of the categories of the local in relation to the Greek divine persona in response to the problem of location come into the picture here: as a realisation of the general, as the place at which variation occurs, and as two dynamic forces that variously intersect in different locations at which ancient Greek religion manifests itself. Kindt shows that Classical scholars have used the local and the general in different ways to navigate such challenges of location. She points to the strengths and weaknesses of different uses and identifies productive avenues for further research. She concludes that recent developments in the study of ancient Greek religion, in particular the critique of the polis model of ancient Greek religion, have invigorated the study of local Greek religion. Once firmly linked to the city-state, the conception of the local has opened up to include a variety of ways in which ancient Greek religious beliefs and practices are grounded in local landscapes, local histories, and local communities.

Introduction It has frequently been said that ancient Greek religion is notoriously hard to define.1 The reason for this is that it lacks many of the structures, 1

See e.g. Kindt 2009: 9 for some comments on the structure of ancient Greek religion. See also Beck 2020: 135 on the relevance of the local in this respect.

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institutions, and sources of authority that define other religious traditions. Ancient Greek religion had no church and no separate class of priests. It also lacked a holy book, a dogma, and a creed. The Greeks did not even have a word for religion as such, and religion was embedded in society to such an extent that it was not perceived to be separate and separable from the contexts in which it was practiced.2 This peculiarity of ancient Greek religion makes it difficult to describe the unity and diversity of the religious culture of the ancient Greeks. On what grounds are we to decide what was at the centre of the Greek religious experience, and what was at its periphery? Or, to put the same question differently: who is going to determine what should count as typical or central in a religious tradition with multiple centres and peripheries? Ancient Greek religion articulated itself along different lines and in altogether different terms than many of the other religious traditions we are familiar with. It follows that if we want to understand ancient Greek religion in itself and in its relationship to society, we need to consider alternative structures, institutions, and sources of authority to those we traditionally refer to when we describe other religious traditions. ‘The local’ and ‘the universal’ (or ‘general’, ‘Panhellenic’) are two categories that are frequently invoked in Classical scholarship to describe the unity and diversity of ancient Greek religion.3 Classical scholars speak of local and universal cults, of local universal festivals, of local and universal divine personas, and of local and universal myths. It may be tempting to see such references as merely ‘practical’ or incidental.4 Yet that would be to turn a blind eye on what is at stake when we make such distinctions. Even cursory references to ‘the local’ and ‘the universal’ ultimately betray a conception of ancient Greek religion according to which beliefs and practices are organised around two opposing poles or forces. Yet despite the heavy conceptual weight both conceptions are carrying in many accounts of ancient Greek religion, they are rarely defined, with Classical scholars applying them differently, in different avenues of study, and to very different ends.

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On the embeddedness of ancient Greek religion, see Bremmer 1994: 2–4; Kindt 2012: 16–19; Eidinow 2015. See also the contribution of Hans Beck to this volume (Chapter 2). In current research in the field, these terms frequently feature as synonymous. Overall, I prefer to speak of ‘the general’ dimension of ancient Greek religion over ‘universal’ or ‘panhellenic’ due to the misleading associations that these terms evoke. On the notion of ‘panhellenism’ in ancient Greek religion, see e.g. Scott 2010: 250–73 (with further literature); Polinskaya 2013: 493. As suggested by Polinskaya 2013: 492, n. 9 in response to my chapter on religious localism at Olympia in Kindt 2012: 124.

Localism and the Study of Ancient Greek Religion

This applies in particular to the category of ‘the local’. In most instances, it simply features in passing as a purely descriptive category in the context of alternative variants sketched against the background of what was thought to be universally the case in ancient Greek religion as such.5 In this conception, the local mostly doubles as the idiosyncratic, deviant, and ultimately insignificant, but who or what is determining centre and periphery here remains frequently unclear (see in more detail below). The conception of the ‘general’, ‘global’ or ‘universal’ is only at first sight more straightforward. As Irene Polinskaya has pointed out, in current scholarship in the field, ‘the general’ features in three related but distinct contexts: ‘doing things in a Greek way, doing what other Greeks do, and feeling Greek’.6 All three dimensions focus on different aspects of Hellenicity, rendering the conception of ‘the general’ less clear-cut than may initially appear. Moreover, this dimension of ancient Greek religion remains largely virtual until it manifests in a particular time and place, thus blurring the boundary between ‘the local’ and ‘the general’. This chapter revolves around a series of interrelated questions. What is ‘local’ Greek religion? What dimension of the religious comes into focus only in the category of ‘the local’? How does it relate to the notion of religion as a universal force that prevailed at different levels of ancient Greek culture and society and that helped to convey a sense of Hellenicity? And, finally and most importantly, what can the study of local Greek religion contribute to our understanding of localism in the ancient world. I shall try to answer at least some of these questions by exploring how localism has been studied, is studied, and could be studied in a particular area in which such questions of unity and diversity have been particularly prevalent: that of the ancient Greek gods and goddesses. Classical scholars have pursued radically different approaches to the study of Greek divinity, generating divergent pictures of the unity and diversity of the Greek pantheon and the individual gods that comprise it. The categories of ‘the local’ and ‘the general’ have played a key role in scholarly disagreements in this dynamic area of current debate. To consider how they have been used and to what end allows insights into what is at stake when we speak of ‘local horizons’ of ancient Greek religion more generally. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the use of both dimensions in the study of the Greek divinities has evolved together with the larger shifts in paradigm in 5

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See e.g. Walter Burkert’s (1985) comments on local variants in Greek representation of the gods and goddesses. Polinskaya 2013: 516.

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the study of ancient Greek religion. To trace some of these developments therefore sheds light not only on new insights into the nature of Greek divinity, but also on its larger context of scholarship on ancient Greek religion. I show that, as far as the ancient Greek gods and goddesses are concerned, both the local and the universal dimensions reveal different aspects of one and the same deity. So even though neither ‘the local’ nor ‘the universal’ are unproblematic categories, they are able to capture different aspects of the religious experience of the ancient Greeks. Far from being the antagonistic categories as which they are sometimes still presented, ‘the local’ and ‘the universal’ together define the religious tradition of the ancient Greeks. Considered in interaction with each other, they allow us to explore a central dynamics within ancient Greek religion: the interplay between localising and universalising forces or tendencies as they can be observed in a number of ancient texts and contexts, including in myth, sacrifice, divination, and divine representation.

The Problem of the Unity and Diversity of Ancient Greek Divinity To understand how questions of unity and diversity apply to the study of the ancient Greek gods and goddesses some general remarks about the nature of Greek divinity are in order. Like in most religious traditions, the question of ‘what is a god or goddess?’ is central also to ancient Greek religion.7 It informs the body of cultural beliefs and practices in the ancient world that we refer to as religion. It also gives us insights into the ancient Greek outlook on life in a number of areas: morality, justice, and causation, and ancient Greek views of what it means to be human – and what it means to be Greek. Frequently overlooked in scholarly discussions of this question is the fact that it can be answered in two fundamentally different ways: ontologically – as a statement about what sets the supernatural apart – and in terms of the unity and coherence of a particular deity. Understood as an ontological problem, the question has generated productive research into the kind of features (or powers) that distinguish the Greek gods and goddesses from humanity, above all those of immortality, omniscience, and

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As Albert Henrichs (2010: 20–22) has reminded us, the question was first raised explicitly by Pindar.

Localism and the Study of Ancient Greek Religion

superhuman strength and beauty.8 Understood as a question about the unity of a given deity as imagined by the ancient Greeks, however, the response to this question has become such a commonplace in the way we think of ancient Greek religion that it is rarely discussed. Classical scholarship routinely makes use of a central image – a central metaphor – to conceptualise the nature of Greek divinity: that of the divine persona.9 The significance of this idea to ancient Greek religion cannot be underestimated. Much of ancient Greek thinking about the nature of the gods and their availability to human knowledge is channelled through the concept of the divine persona: To say that the gods are like people harbours a series of complex claims about their nature. When we think of Apollo, Zeus, or Aphrodite we tend to think of them as having the attributes of personhood, and with these I refer not only the obvious characteristics of divine anthropomorphism – the fact that gods frequently look and act like humans – but also more abstract traits such as agency, self-awareness, and an understanding of values, both real and symbolic, to name just a few.10 To conceive of the gods as persons has the advantage of providing a template into which different kinds of information about individual divinities can be integrated. It is in the image of the divine persona that disparate myths about a deity’s birth, parentage, character feats, and interpersonal relations link up, that seemingly unrelated areas of influence come together; it is in the image of the divine persona that various ritual practices like prayer and sacrifice make sense: precisely because they are directed towards a being that shows many, if not all, of the attributes of personhood, and is thus able to appreciate and respond to words and deeds.11 Given the central role it plays in current scholarship, it may be surprising to note that the conception of the divine persona has emerged in Classical scholarship only relatively late. It is linked to the works of some of the most important scholars which have shaped the field in the twentieth century. While the notion is still conspicuously absent from Den grekiska religionens historia (1922) of the Swedish scholar Martin P. Nilsson, which

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See in detail Henrichs 2010 (with further literature). Ancient Greek divine ontologies also draw on the category of the animal, albeit in different ways than that of the human. See in detail Bremmer 2020. See e.g. Pirenne-Delforge 2013; Bonnet, Belayche, and Albert-Llorca 2017. Divine anthropomorphism: Osborne 2011: 185–215; Petridou 2016: 32–43. See Larson 2016: 40–47 for an account of the reciprocity between gods and humans in ancient Greek religion informed by cognitive theory.

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in its German translation (Geschichte der griechischen Religion, 1927) went through several editions, it can be traced back as far as W. F. Otto’s Die Götter Griechenlands (1929).12 For Otto, each divinity was a separate articulation of the ancient Greek genius (‘Geist’).13 The goddess Athena, for example, is characterised by Otto as such: ‘No more than other genuine divinities can Athena be understood from a single and particularly striking activity. The powerful mind which made her the Genius of victory extends far beyond the range of the battlefield. Only the “bright eyed intelligence” . . . is an adequate characterisation of her ideal with its multiplicity of vital functions.’14 In his book on interpretations of Dionysos, Park McGinty concludes that, even though Otto himself never refers to it as such, this amounted to ‘a kind of personality’.15 The earliest clear articulation of the concept of the divine persona then comes from Walter Burkert, who, in his famous account of Archaic and Classical Greek religion, referred to the gods having ‘eine dauerhafte Identität’, rendered into the English translation of his book as ‘a distinctive personality’.16 The conception of the divine persona draws on an image generated by the ancient Greeks themselves. In Homeric epic, the gods and goddesses feature as complex characters who love, long, hope, fight, and suffer alongside human protagonists. It is the concept of divine personhood that allows the Greek hero Menelaos insight into the real reason for Odysseus’ long travels when he speculates on Zeus’ character. In Book Four of the Odyssey he states: ἀλλὰ τὰ μέν που μέλλεν ἀγάσσεσθαι θεὸς αὐτός, ὃς κεῖνον δύστηνον ἀνόστιμον οἶον ἔθηκεν. – ‘But of this, I suppose, the god himself must have been jealous, who to that hapless man alone vouchsafed no return.’17 Like a person, Zeus and the Greek gods and goddesses express emotions and are engaged in a complex network of relationships. Like persons they are organised in terms of family relations and genealogical relationships. The advantages of this are clear: gods who look and act like persons inherently ‘make sense’.18

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See e.g. ‘Ein Gott ist gewachsen nicht durch innere, von seiner ursprünglichen Funktion ausgehenden Entwicklung, sondern auch durch das Hinzutreten von mehr äußerlich angeschlossenen Elementen’ (Nilsson 1927: 386). 14 15 See e.g. Otto 1929: 57. Otto 1929: 57. McGinty 1978: 163. See Burkert 1985: 119, 123; German orig.: Burkert 1977: 119, 197. ‘An enduring personality’ would be a closer translation of ‘dauerhafte Identität’, which puts the focus slightly differently. Hom. Od. 4.181–82. See Osborne 2011: 194–215 for an extended account of the history of the divine body in ancient Greece.

Localism and the Study of Ancient Greek Religion

Although the same enthusiasm for direct physical encounters between gods and humans did not endure into later centuries, and the human– divine relationship was re-cast along more abstract lines, the conception of the divine persona remained largely intact throughout Classical antiquity. The Homeric, person-based conception of divinity remained in the background as a powerful response to the question of what the Greek gods and goddesses were like.19 For example, the concept of divine jealousy – an inherently ‘human’ trait embedded in the notion of divine of personhood – also informs the concept of divine revenge and jealousy paraded in as diverse genres as Greek tragedy and the Histories of Herodotus.20 It still resonated strongly in the literature of Roman Greece with its focus on the Classical past, and it also influenced the early Christian writers.21 Despite its undeniable explanatory powers, however, the notion of the divine persona raises as many questions as it answers. Problems emerge as soon as we scrutinise the coherence of the picture ancient sources reveal about the Greek gods and goddesses. As soon as we consider the local evidence from different parts of the Greek world, the idea of a unified divine persona shows itself to be more problematic. Consider for example the case of the divine epithets, the ‘bynames’ Greeks added to their gods to further qualify their identity. The existence of geographical divine epithets referring to a particular place flags a number of issues about the integrity of the divine persona.22 Is Apollo Delios (‘of the island of Delos’) the same or a different god from Apollo Teneatos (‘of the city of Tenea)?23 What does it mean that the Aphrodite Kypria (‘of Cyprus’) was worshipped well beyond the island and that her cults were found in different parts of the ancient Greek world?24 And, moving beyond local epithets: why did Zeus feature with different epithets within the confines of the same community?25 What (if any) was the 19 20

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On the anthropomorphism of the Homeric gods see Gagné and Herrero de Jáuregui 2019. E.g. Aphrodite’s jealousy and vengeance in Eur. Hipp. 21–28; and the gods’ jealousy and anger falling on Kroisos, Hdt. 1.34, and foretold by Artabanos, Hdt. 7.10. See e.g. Theoph. Ad Autol. 1.3; Cyprian Ad Demetrainum 7. Toponyms here serve as a shorthand to a whole set of contexts and ‘locations’ including those of landscape, memory, cults and the people servicing them, etc. I thank Corinne Bonnet for pointing this out to me. Delios: Soph. Aj. 704; Thuc. 1.13.6. Teneatos: Strabo 8.6.22, cf. Paus. 2.5.4. E.g. in places as disparate as Athens (Paus. 9.5.17); Corinth (Strabo 8.6.20); Sparta (Paus. 3.15.10); Metropolis in Thessaly (Paus. 9.5.17); etc. On the unity and diversity of Aphrodite see in detail Pirenne-Delforge 2013. As for example the case in Attica where Zeus was worshipped not only as Zeus Olympios (Paus. 1.17.2), but also as Zeus Panhellenios (‘of all Greeks’, Paus. 1.18.9), Zeus Ktesios (‘of gain’, Paus. 1.31.4), Zeus Soter (‘saviour’, Str. 9.1.16), Zeus Eleutherios (‘liberator’, Pl. Theag.

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relationship between Zeus Horkios (‘of oaths’) and Zeus Panhellenios (‘of all Greeks’)?26 Is a god or goddess with the same epithet in different parts of the Greek world the same divinity?27 The concept of the divine persona is at odds with the fragmented identity of the Greek gods and goddesses as presented in our sources. Already in antiquity, the opportunities that this plurality provided for a stinging refutation of belief in the divine persona did not go unnoticed. In the later second century CE, for example, the Christian apologist Clement of Alexandria offered a blistering critique of the traditional religions of Greece and Rome, specifically targeting the conception of the Greek gods. He states: There are some who record three gods of the name of Zeus: one in Arcadia, the son of Aether, the other two being sons of Cronus . . . Some assume five Athenas . . . And what if I were to tell you of the many gods named Asclepius, or of every Hermes that is enumerated, or of every Hephaestus that occurs in your mythology? Shall I not seem to be needlessly drowning your ears by the number of their names?28

Divine names, Clement says here, make sense only when they refer to a single god or goddess. The moment there are many Athenas or Aphrodites or Hermes in play, the concept of the divine persona – and the religious system based on it – becomes problematic at best. The question of ‘what is a Greek god or goddess?’ remained relevant throughout antiquity. As a question about the unity and diversity of an individual deity it challenges our understanding of the integrity of the divine persona. And, as I will show in the next section of this chapter, it does so in ways that relate directly to how Classical scholars have conceived of the category of ‘the local’.

Localism and the Divine Persona: Debates and Positions Classical scholarship has made use of the categories of ‘the local’ and ‘the general’ in order to answer questions of the unity and diversity of the

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121a), Zeus Boulaios (‘of the council’, Paus. 1.3.5), Zeus Hypatos (‘the highest’, Paus. 1.26.5), and Zeus Polieus (‘guardian of the city’, Paus. 1.28.10). Zeus Horkios: e.g. Paus. 5.24.2. Zeus Panhellenios: e.g. Paus. 1.44.13. As for example is the case with Apollo Archegetes (‘first leader’) who was worshipped in Megara (Paus. 1.42.5), Naxos in Sicily (Thuc. 6.3), and Kyrene in Libya (Pind. Pyth. 5.60). Clem. Al. Protr. 2.24 P. Transl. G. W. Butterworth.

Localism and the Study of Ancient Greek Religion

ancient Greek gods and goddesses. In scholarship in the field, ‘the local’ has featured in three different ways. First, as a realisation of ‘the general’. Second, as the point where variation within ancient Greek religion occurs. And third, along with the general as two cultural forces that variously cross over and intersect. All three lines of enquiry conceptualise the relationship of the local and the universal in different ways, offering different responses to questions of unity and diversity. While the first two perspectives are not without merit, there are problems inherent to both. The third and most recent perspective transcends these problems. It moves beyond the binary between localising and generalising views on ancient Greek religion that has shaped much scholarship in the past and investigates their interplay at different locations at which ancient Greek religion manifested.

The Local as the Realisation of the Universal A powerful line of enquiry into the nature of Greek divinity draws a general picture of the ancient Greek gods, emerging from myriad local representations. Take the ancient Greek god Apollo.29 Pots and reliefs from different parts of the Greek world show that representations of Apollo adhere to a common visual language, with the god typically represented as a handsome young man, sporting a bow and an arrow or a lyre (among other visual clues) as on the attic red-figure calyx-krater represented in Figure 1.1.30 The argument here is that as a major Olympian deity, Apollo was worshipped throughout the Greek world in ways that were recognisable and ‘made sense’ to Greeks from other poleis. That is to say that general areas of influence – in healing, music, poetry, purifications, and prophecy – remained remarkably consistent no matter whether at Athens, or Sparta, on the beautiful Greek island of Delos, or elsewhere in the Greek world.31 This picture of unity is further supported by the Homeric epics, in which Apollo features as a (more-or-less) well-rounded and powerful divine persona.32 In the Iliad, he intervenes on behalf of Khryses and is involved

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On Apollo see now Graf 2009. Representations of Apollo: LIMC II.2., s.v. ‘Apollon/Apollo’: 182–454. See e.g. the evidence collected in ThesCRA II.5, s.v. ‘Rites et activités relatifs aux images du culte’: 419–507, in particular 431 (Apollo). But see Herrero de Jáuregui 2021 on panhellenic and local dimensions of divinity in Homer. The Homeric gods: Graziosi 2013.

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Figure 1.1 Apollo and Tityos. Attic red-figure calyx-krater. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

in Patroclos’ murder by Hector.33 In the Odyssey, Apollo brings about plagues and is associated with song and prophecy.34 The picture of the potent god emerging from epic poetry is grounded in the integrity of the divine persona in the context of the epic universe. Incidentally, this is exactly how Apollo features in Walter Burkert’s enduringly influential account of ancient Greek religion.35 After a brief account of the origins of the deity, Burkert foregrounds the general dimension of Apollo as a deity worshipped throughout the Greek world.36 About his role in healing, for example, Burkert states: ‘That Apollo is a god of healing remains a central trait in his worship from the mythical foundation of Didyma when Branchos, ancestor of the priestly line of the Branchidai, banished a plague, to the building of the well-preserved temple in the lonely mountains of Bassai in Arkadia.’37 Here and elsewhere, Burkert conveys the impression of unity as if there was a Greek master-narrative about Apollo, his identity, relations, and areas of influence, which, albeit

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See Hom Il. 1.8–21; Hom Il. 16.788–857 respectively. Plague: Hom. Il. 1.43–53. Song: Hom. Il. 8.488. Prophecy: Hom. Il. 8.79–81, 15.252–53. Burkert 1985: 143–49. ‘Apollo has often been described . . . as “the most Greek of the gods”’. Burkert 1985: 143. Burkert 1985: 147.

Localism and the Study of Ancient Greek Religion

never spelt out explicitly, can be recovered from individual authors, texts, and institutions (e.g. his role at Delphi). The local thus provides the information from which the general picture of Apollo is derived. It acts as a source of information to sustain the picture of religion as a general force. Burkert is not alone in propagating such a conception of the ancient Greek divine persona. We all draw on similar ideas of the local and the general when we speak of the Greek goddess Aphrodite, or the typical areas of influence of Persephone, or, indeed, of the standard form of ancient Greek blood sacrifice, divinatory ritual, or prayer. In seeking to derive a general picture of any given phenomenon, we start from the particular and gradually move towards its more abstract features to establish a type. Underlying this conception of ancient Greek religion is the view – ultimately structuralist – that ancient Greece existed as a cultural unit of individual poleis resembling each other, if not a formal political whole. In the realm of religion, this cultural unity manifested in the religious setup of the individual poleis: the major forms of religious beliefs and practices were the same or at least similar enough to ‘make sense’ to individuals from other parts of the Greek world.38 The picture of religious likeness among different poleis emerging from this perspective is ultimately one of ‘family resemblance’: while not all features typical of the family were present in all poleis, the religious profile of a given polis still included enough of them to qualify as a member of the family. We will return to these points below when we discuss their significance in the context of what has been termed ‘polis religion’. Meanwhile, it remains to be said that the Greeks themselves occasionally expressed a similar view of religion as a central aspect of a joint Hellenic culture. We find it articulated in a famous passage from Herodotus’ Histories. In Book Eight, the Athenians make the case for not joining the Persian side in the Greco-Persian Wars. In conversation with the Spartans, the Athenians refer to shared temples, gods and blood ties to explain what was at stake for the Greeks collectively.39 Although the Greeks did not have a word for religion, they did have a sense of religious beliefs and practices as a dimension of life bringing them together and differentiating them from

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See e.g. Price 1999: 3–10 for a succinct account of religion as a system common to the Greeks. Justifying why they will not join the Persian side of the conflict, the Athenians state: ‘There are many compelling reasons against our doing so, even if we wished: the first and greatest is the burning of the temples and images of our gods . . . Again, there is the Greek nation (to Hellēnikon) – the community of blood and language, temples and ritual, and our common customs.’ Hdt. 8.144.2. (transl. J. Marincola).

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others.40 Herodotus himself attributes this to the influence of Homer and other Panhellenic poetry and points to their significance in unifying the Greek pantheon.41 Following such considerations, John Gould speaks of a general system shared by all Greeks, analogous to language.42 If we want an analogy to help us understand religion, one that will direct our attention positively to what is important in religious systems, we should turn . . . to language. Like language, religion is a cultural phenomenon, a phenomenon of the group . . . and like language, any religion is a system of signs enabling communication both between members of the group in interpreting and responding to experience of the external world and in the individual’s inner discourse with himself as to his own behaviour, emotional and private.43

Because language acts as both a collective symbolic system and a symbolic medium that allows individual articulations, it provides a suitable analogy for religion, which likewise consists of individual and general dimensions.44 How this matters to the study of localism is immediately at hand: the notion of religion as a language speaks directly to questions of unity and diversity in ancient Greek religion. The general dimension of ancient Greek religion describes the universal structures in which it articulates itself. The local dimension of ancient Greek religion then emerges from how the language is put to use in different city-states and places throughout the ancient Greek world. In other words: the general structures of ancient Greek religion provide the common grammar that informs the local use of the language in the individual poleis. The local emerges as the realisation of the general. There is nothing wrong with this approach, except, perhaps, that the picture of unity comes at a price: that of divergences and inconsistencies within the system.45 What is frequently forgotten in accounts of ancient Greek religion is that this picture of unity can only be derived once all ‘local’ variants and variations have been dismissed as idiosyncrasies, or

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Polinskaya (2013: 516, 533) rightly points out that Herodotus’ passage has to be evaluated against the background of the particular external threat provided by the Persian invasion of Greece and does not necessarily constitute universal views beyond this particular situation. On religion in and of Herodotus see T. Harrison 2000 and (more recently) Pirenne-Delforge 2020. Gould 2001. See Kindt 2012: 70–80 for a critical appreciation of Gould’s account. 44 Gould 2001: 206–07. On the individual dimension see in detail Kindt 2015. On which see Versnel 1990–93.

Localism and the Study of Ancient Greek Religion

exceptions that matter at a local level but have no bearing on the structures of ancient Greek religion as such.46 In this line of research, the general dimension of ancient Greek religion stands as the smallest common denominator between what was believed and practised in different parts of the ancient Greek world. Yet we may wonder: what forces drive such generalising tendencies in ancient Greek religion? What authorities underwrite it? What institutions support it? Given that ancient Greek religion was missing many traditional structures and authorities well-known from other religious traditions, the notion of ancient Greek religion as a general force remains fundamentally elusive. Because, as I have argued above, ancient Greek religion lacked the usual structures of authority, there was more space for variation in religious beliefs and practices than in other religious traditions. Indeed, it is exactly this absence of universalising forces that makes the general dimension of ancient Greek religion less than the sum of its – local – parts. Until we find a way of integrating such concerns in our conception of unity and diversity, our attempts to understand ancient Greek religion ultimately describe an artificial and abstract concept not grounded in any particular time and place.

The Local as the Place at Which Variation Occurs The problems just described emerge largely as the result of a preference for the general over the particular or local. In response to such concerns, some scholars have pursued the opposite approach and foregrounded the local over the general dimensions of ancient Greek religion. To focus exclusively on religion as it manifests itself at a particular time and place has the advantage of providing conceptual space for the description and analysis of all religious beliefs and practices occurring in a certain place and time, no matter whether they had equivalents elsewhere in the Greek world or were specific to that place. The extant evidence for local religious beliefs and practices reveals considerable variation within the ancient Greek religious system.47 A famous example of this kind of variation involves seven series of clay 46 47

See also Kindt 2012: 25–27 on this point. The scholars associated with the Copenhagen Polis Centre have brought the multiplicity of poleis to our attention and making local information accessible. See e.g. Hansen and Nielsen 2004.

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plaques dating from the first half of the fifth century BCE.48 These plaques were found at the Sanctuary of Persephone at Lokroi and feature scenes well known from Greek myth. Some of these representations show a girl being driven away by a beardless young man in a chariot, clearly referring to the myth about the abduction and rape of Persephone by Hades as it circulated throughout the Greek world. It is an example of a general Greek myth represented in a particular (local) context. In her influential article ‘Persephone and Aphrodite at Locri’, Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood pointed out that a number of these plaques present Persephone in contexts in which she is not associated in the general myth.49 Some show the goddess voluntarily enter the chariot of her young husband, with her friends waving her off into marriage. Others make an even more explicit connection between the goddess and the contexts of marriage, domesticity, and childrearing. They depict a female priest and four women carrying a robe, probably a bridal robe for Persephone. Or they feature her putting a folded towel into a box – clearly a domestic scene. The connection between Persephone and the realms of marriage and the oikos is peculiar to Lokroi. In other parts of the Greek world, SourvinouInwood argues, Hera usually fulfils this role. The local emerges as the point at which variation within the system of ancient Greek religion occurs. Sourvinou-Inwood takes this example as her point of reference for a scathing critique of scholars foregrounding the general over the local. She argues that ‘too often in the study of Greek divinities, the local personality of a deity is overshadowed by the Panhellenic one and the individuality of the different local deities is ignored.’50 The solution to the problem, then, is to reverse the traditional approach: ‘Consequently to avoid the danger of distortions we must study each local divine personality of a deity separately from the Panhellenic one, and not use evidence from the latter to determine the former. Instead, we must recover each local manifestation of the personality, and then relate it to the Panhellenic persona.’51 This is to say that we should research local manifestations of divinity in their own right first, before they are related to the general picture. The line of enquiry which foregrounds the local over the general has proved productive. It has opened conceptual space for the appreciation of variants and variations within the Greek religious system. Athens, for example, seems to have nursed a particular link with Athena, their tutelary deity through local myths and cults.52 At Sparta, one of the distinctive 48 51

49 See e.g. Prückner 1968. Sourvinou-Inwood 1978. 52 Sourvinou-Inwood 1978: 102. Deacy 2007.

50

Sourvinou-Inwood 1978: 101.

Localism and the Study of Ancient Greek Religion

features of local worship was a particular reliance on and propensity for supernatural explanations.53 And at Alexandria, distinctly Egyptian influences on the Greek religious system variously emerged, including, above all perhaps, a particular interest in the veneration of Serapis.54 Further insights generated by this approach extend beyond the study of Greek divinity and apply to issues of localism in ancient Greek religion more widely. Especially when applied to places like Athens, with its abundance of evidence, this approach continues to yield rich information on the social, historical, and political roles of religion in its local contexts to supplement the cultural picture emerging from the foregrounding of the universal over the local. Robert Parker’s work can serve as a case in point. Two of his books are entirely devoted to the study of the religion of a single polis. Athenian Religion: A History (1996) traces the transformation of the religious system at Athens, from the Archaic period all the way to Hellenistic Greece. Polytheism and Society at Athens (2005) outlines the major thematic structures of Athenian religion. In On Greek Religion (2011), Parker includes ‘place’ as one of the major points at which variation occurs in the Greek religious system, on par with sections on ‘social position’, ‘gender’, and personal religion.55 Yet, as soon we move to other places within the ancient Greek world that do not yield the same wealth of information as Athens, SourvinouInwood’s concerns still stand: ‘We must not extrapolate from one local cult to another and attempt to interpret an aspect found in one place through another found elsewhere. Nor should we conflate evidence from different parts of the Greek world.’56 This is well said and something with which few scholars these days would disagree. Yet to follow this advice, occasionally at least, proves surprisingly difficult. As soon as the study of localism moves beyond mere description of evidence and attempts to speak to more general problems, questions of convergence and divergence emerge: is a local representation of a god or goddess a conscious deviation from the norm? Is such variation a meaningful inversion of what is generally the case elsewhere in the Greek world? And how do such variants relate to the general picture of a particular deity? Sourvinou-Inwood rightly cautions us against using local information in this way. Not every variation in the system, she has argued, is necessarily a deviation. In other words: not every local variation constitutes a conscious departure from the general. Suggesting otherwise would invest the general 53 56

Richter 2007: in particular 243–46. Sourvinou-Inwood 1978: 102.

54

Dunand 2007.

55

Parker 2011: 224–64.

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picture of the Greek gods with a quasi-dogmatic force it never really had. We need to be careful not to reduce the relationship between the local and the general to questions of adherence and divergence. The historical situation is more complex than that. Before we move on to discuss the third way in which localism features in Classical scholarship on ancient Greek religion, it is worth pausing for a moment to consider how the conceptions of ‘the local’ and ‘the general’ just discussed fit into the larger study of ancient Greek religion. To think of ‘the local’ as a realisation of ‘the general’ or as a place at which variation occurs ties into a conception that has been invariably powerful in the study of ancient Greek religion: that of polis religion. Polis religion conceives of ancient Greek religion as operating on three levels of ancient Greek society: that of the polis, the ‘world-of-the-polis’ system, and the Panhellenic dimension. The conceptions of ‘the local’ and ‘the universal’ discussed so far sustain the view that religion mapped onto the structures of ancient Greek society. In the works discussed above, the polis features as ultimate manifestation of ‘the local’. The general dimension of ancient Greek religion, then, is brought into the picture to substantiate the claim that the religious setup of the individual poleis resembled each other (in the ‘world-of-the-polis system’) and the way in which this contributed to a shared feeling of Hellenicity (‘the Panhellenic dimension’). Ever since the 1960s, the model of polis religion has been invariably influential in the way in which Classical scholars conceive of ancient Greek religion. In the absence of many of the traditional religious structures and authorities mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, Classical scholars have referred to the ancient Greek polis as a way of locating (and contextualising) ancient Greek religious beliefs and practice. This way of looking at ancient Greek religion has proved invariably productive. It has moved religion to the core of our understanding of ancient Greek politics and society. In particular since the early 2000s, however, the polis religion model has increasingly come under criticism. Classical scholars, including the author of this chapter, have argued that it does not tell the whole story of how ancient Greek religion is ‘embedded’ in Greek society and the world more generally.57 And at least in some forms and formulations it has rendered ancient Greek religion less intelligible than it ought to be. This is not the 57

See in detail Bremmer 2010; Eidinow 2011; Kindt 2012 (with further literature). See Beck 2020: 128–33 for a critique of polis religion in the context of the study of localism in the ancient Greek world more generally.

Localism and the Study of Ancient Greek Religion

place to re-iterate these arguments. This is merely to point out that the adjustments made in the wake of the criticism of the polis model have invigorated the study of ancient Greek religious localism. Three developments in particular are worth pointing out here. First, the conception of ‘the local’ is now conceived of more widely to include locations of the religious above and below the polis level. Regional religion, maritime religion, the religion of the demes and phratries, the religion of the oikos, and personal religion (to name just a few examples) now have a much stronger presence in the picture we sketch of ancient Greek religion, and they do so in ways that no longer remain always and necessarily tied to the polis. Second, as Hans Beck has recently pointed out, this development has coincided with a widening focus on the way in which religion is tied to more general notions of ‘place’ rather than in local socio-political structures only.58 Nature, landscape, local stories and meanings now all (re-) emerge as important contexts for the study of religion alongside the political and social as central locations.59 Third, the nature of the categories of ‘the local’ and ‘the general’ themselves have been revised. Rather than static categories, they are now frequently conceived of as relational, mutually defining each other and exposing a larger dynamics at the heart of ancient Greek religion: that of the interplay between localising and generalising tendencies or forces. All three aspects will feature prominently in Hans Beck’s Chapter in this volume.

The Local and the Universal as Ubiquitous and Intersecting Categories Part of the reason why the binary proved so persistent in the study of ancient Greek religion is that Classical scholars frequently draw implicitly on the concepts of the local and the universal, without considering their implications and conceptual baggage. In this respect, too, SourvinouInwood’s article proved a turning point. In the wake of her article, a growing group of scholars now openly discuss the meaning, scope, and 58 59

Beck 2020: 132. I say ‘re-emerge’ because these aspects of ancient Greek religion already featured prominently in older scholarship, for example in the works of Jane Ellen Harrison, but in ways that differ starkly from current perspectives and paradigms.

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limits of both concepts and look for ways to move beyond the binary that has shaped much research to date. Scholars now openly navigate around arguments of adherence and divergence between local and general perspectives in the study of the Greek divine persona. Efforts to overcome the duality focus on both sides of the old binary. On the general/Panhellenic side of the picture, this perspective has produced insights into the ways in which Hellenicity is and is not more than its constitutive (local) parts. A particular focus of research in this area to date has been on those institutions which have traditionally been associated with the idea of ‘Panhellenism’: Olympia and Delphi, but also Homer, and the Homeric hymns, and Greek lyric poetry.60 Michael Scott, for example, has questioned the usefulness of the term ‘Panhellenism’ and in particular its application to the sanctuaries of Delphi and Olympia during the Archaic and Classical periods.61 He has stressed that far from bringing together visitors from all over the Greek world (as implied in the ‘pan’ of Panhellenism), the catchment areas of both sanctuaries changed over their long histories. At the same time, Scott advocates for a much broader understanding of the kind of cultural practices carried out at both Delphi and Olympia. It was not just the consultation of oracles that brought the Greeks together at the Sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi, for example, but also the celebration of Games and the interest to engage with ‘local’ information from different parts of the Greek world (and beyond) through setting up and viewing dedications. This broader understanding, in turn, has changed the way in which we view the scope and meaning of Hellenicity articulated at institutions like this one. It illustrates that competition, even outright inter-Greek adversary or hostility (e.g. on the battlefield and in sporting competitions), is an integral part of the story the Greeks told about themselves in places such as the oracle of Apollo at Delphi and the Sanctuary of Zeus at Olympia. In Rethinking Greek Religion (2012), I sought to extend this line of enquiry to the question of how religion maps onto different layers of Greek society, including that of the polis.62 Again the focus on the cultural practice of setting up dedications is at the core of the investigation. I hope to have illuminated the way in which dedications allow for the representation of multiple local identities – while still drawing on a common visual language. The study of statues and divine representations on display at the Sanctuary of Zeus at Olympia shows how local events and identities from 60 62

E.g. Scott 2010; Kindt 2012: 123–54. Kindt 2012: 123–54.

61

Scott 2010: in particular 250–73.

Localism and the Study of Ancient Greek Religion

all over the Greek world were brought into the physical space of the sanctuary and put in a spatial and symbolic relationship to each other. The local emerges as a part of the general or Panhellenic. Moving from the focus on the general/Panhellenic to the local side of the picture: the binary between local and general approaches to ancient Greek religion has come under scrutiny from scholars working on localism too. A parallel line of enquiry to the one examining the scope and meaning of Panhellenism (as discussed above) has focused on advancing a more complicated understanding of the category of ‘the local’ in itself and in its relationship to the general. Hans Beck’s recent study of localism in the ancient Greek world (Localism and the Ancient Greek City-State, 2020) can serve as a case in point. Beck illustrates in impressive clarity that in some sense all Greek religion is local. It is not only the local landscapes, local mythical traditions, local connections and horizons of multiple kinds which ground and (in his words) ‘energise’ ancient Greek religion,63 even translocal and regional manifestations of the religious attained a ‘local force’ of their own.64 It is in local, concrete environments that the general or Panhellenic ideas were grounded and attained concrete shape. Of course, there were universal beliefs and practices that were shared throughout the Greek world, but these were mediated through the lens of the local. All this adds up to an invariably rich and dynamic picture that attains a systemic quality of its own. In Beck’s own words, ‘the local horizon is not reduced to a canvas for segregation and idiosyncrasy. Rather, it represents a religious system of its own.’65 So the idea that ancient Greek religion is ‘a language’ still stands. The focus on localism has not come at the price of coherence and understanding. It is just that this coherence now emerges, in part at least, from the way in which religion resonates with its local contexts. The result is a much more meaningful conception of the ‘embeddedness’ of ancient Greek religion within local places and landscapes than the model of polis religion could afford. Beck’s work shares with many others that it no longer conceives of localising and generalising tendencies as dualistic (or binary) forces. Rather, these tendencies or forces now appear together and in interaction with each other across various places at which ancient Greek religion manifested itself. In a nutshell: the local is present in the general, just as the general is present in the local. 63 65

Beck 2020: 135. Beck 2020: 132.

64

See Beck 2020: 141 on the Sanctuary of Apollo at Didyma.

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To return once more from the study of Greek religion to that of the ancient Greek gods: both Irene Polinskaya’s monumental book on the religion of Aigina and Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge and Gabriella Pironti’s co-authored account of the role of Hera in ancient Greek polytheism provide examples of successful studies of the Greek gods and goddesses beyond the local–general binary. In A Local History of Greek Polytheism (2013) Polinskaya explores how the Greek island of Aigina juggled general and specific aspects in the setup and use of their local pantheon. Polinskaya finds fault with scholars who have envisaged local and general approaches as ultimately incompatible. She argues that ‘the contrast between the presumed Hellenic cultural unity and the documented social diversity has led scholars to make a false choice between either culture or social structure in the study of religion.’66 To navigate around such tendencies she follows the influential American anthropologist Robert Levy in introducing the concept of ‘mesocosm’ as a unit of study which transcends (or mediates between) the local and the general. The bulk of her book then offers an extensive investigation of the individual deities that constitute what she refers to as ‘the Aeginetan mesocosm’ – the way in which both dimensions remain intricately entwined on the Greek island of Aigina.67 Polinskaya effectively shows that the local Aiginetan pantheon draws on, incorporates, and – in the process of it – transforms aspects of the general religious system. She is, for example, able to illustrate that the Aiginetans adopted earlier and contemporary accounts of cultic figures such as Aiakos, Aigina, and Achilles and connected them differently according to a local genealogy that is specific to the place and that highlights their personal interrelationships as members of the Aiakid stemma with strong local ties.68 The result of such observations is a unique religious system in which general and local forces variously intersect to create a set of beliefs and practices grounded in a particular place and time. Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge and Gabriella Pironti’s study The Hera of Zeus: Intimate Enemy, Ultimate Spouse (2022, French orig. 2016) shares with Polinskaya’s the view that local and general perspectives should not be seen as mutually exclusive. Indeed, the turn against such reductive readings which seek to describe the essential qualities of Hera in the abstract and separated from her local manifestations is a recurrent theme throughout the book. Instead Pirenne-Delforge and Pironti show how 66 68

67 Polinskaya 2013: 21. Polinskaya 2013: in particular 119–344. See in detail Polinskaya 2013: 347–50.

Localism and the Study of Ancient Greek Religion

they come together in shaping the polytheistic system of the ancient Greeks. They illustrate that the divine persona of Hera manifests itself in the form of a complex set of local manifestations and representations that resonate and reference each other in multiple ways. They then go on to explore the figure of Hera (primarily in her relationship with Zeus) from multiple standpoints and perspectives and, in this way, visualise a network of differences and correspondences in her representations. The image of the divine persona, and of the Greek pantheon more generally, emerging from this research is one that is invariably plural with multiple centres and peripheries which do not align simply with the Panhellenic and local dimensions of ancient Greek religion (as older scholarship had it, see above). Both studies, that by Polinskaya and that by Pirenne-Delforge/Pironti, illustrate in their own ways that questions of convergence and divergence no longer suffice to capture the complexity of local representations of ancient Greek religion. The general/Panhellenic system manifests itself in the local just as the local informs and is informed by the general. Both generalising and localising tendencies together and in interaction with each other shape the religious system of the ancient Greeks.

Placing Religion between the Local and the General Finally, we leave the question of the divine persona behind to consider, once again, the larger implications of this perspective. Considering the larger picture emerging from this research, it seems that the duality is most efficiently challenged if one takes a firm stand in either the local or the general context first and then considers how the other category comes into the picture. The local features as part of the general just as much as the general can be part of the local. Yet how does this blending of perspectives, approaches and paradigms occur? What kind of framework allows us to find the local in the general and vice versa? Given that – as I have shown in the previous sections – the foregrounding of the general and the local dimensions of ancient Greek religion have yielded largely incompatible information, we may wonder how the two perspectives can be brought together. Despite significant differences in scope and outlook there are interesting methodological correspondences between these works. In particular Scott’s and Polinskaya’s studies resonate with each other on the methodological plane. A closer look at these resonances reveals that it is a particular kind of

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analysis that in their works is represented as being able to overcome the binary between the local and the general. Both Scott and Polinskaya spend considerable effort in mapping out a framework that allows them to consider local and generalising forces or tendencies together and in interaction with each other. Both scholars do so in using space as their point of departure for their study of ancient Greek religion. Scott concentrates on man-made space – the built-up environment of the sanctuaries of Olympia and Delphi – while Polinskaya chooses the natural space of the island of Aigina as her unit of study.69 Far-reaching resonances then emerge as soon as one compares how both scholars map out their unit of study: the ‘middle level analysis’ advocated by Scott variously reverberates with Polinskaya’s conception of ‘mesocosm’.70 Both levels of analysis are designed to describe a middle-ground between macro and micro perspectives. In Scott’s case, middle-level analysis brings together the traditional interest in individual buildings and structures and the wider landscape of which they are part.71 For Polinskaya, ‘mesocosm’ constitutes a level of analysis which negotiates between individual articulations of the religious and the interest in a particular religious site or cult on the one hand and the religious system as such of which they are part on the other.72 Both Scott and Polinskaya thus see the need to carve out and define an analytic framework in which micro and macro perspectives converge. The results of this move, however, and its significance for the study of Greek religious localism, cannot be underestimated: religious space – once physical (in the case of Scott), once conceptual (in the case of Polinskaya) – emerges as a unit of both unity and diversity, of consistency and variation. The new and revised understanding of Greek religious localism emerging from this work has re-invigorated the old debate about the nature of divinity and of the religious tradition of which it was part. It opens up the field to new and interesting questions: in what spaces do local and general forces intersect? How and in what situations does the general provide a means for the local to relate to a supra-local audience? And are there discernible patterns in the unique blend of local and universal forces as visible in different locations at which ancient Greek religion articulated itself? Whatever the answer to these questions – and

69

70 71

Scott’s unit of study is what he refers to as the ‘built site’ of the sanctuaries of Delphi and Olympia: the entity of buildings and monuments that make up each sanctuary. ‘Mesocosm’: Polinskaya 2013: 32–36. ‘Middle-level analysis’: Scott 2010: 21–28. 72 Scott 2010: 12–21. See Polinskaya 2013: 33.

Localism and the Study of Ancient Greek Religion

the contributions included in this volume answer them in different ways – to differentiate between local and general perspectives on ancient Greek religion and to investigate their intersection at different levels of ancient Greek culture and society allows us to move beyond problems of conformity and divergence, and to appreciate an internal dynamic specific to ancient Greek religion.

Conclusion This chapter set out to explore the scope and meaning of localism in the study of ancient Greek religion. I used the example of the divine persona as a case study to illustrate past and present scholarly positions on the scope and meaning of localism in the field. I showed that even though there are considerable merits in approaches foregrounding either the local over the general or, indeed, the general over the local, both also come at a certain price. While the former disregards diversity, variation, and inconsistencies within the system of ancient Greek religion, the latter, more frequently than not, leads to questions of adherence and divergence which distorts the local material. The potential shortfalls of both approaches are overcome effectively by a third perspective which is able to transcend the dualism between the local and the general. While all three perspectives discussed in this article reveal important dimensions of the Greek conception of divinity, the third one, which conceives of the local and the general as intersecting principles, is most productive. It has redefined the meaning of localism as a force within ancient Greek religion which has articulated itself even in places usually associated with the general or Panhellenic. Most if not all of the chapters included in this book develop such a conception of the local. The local and the general come in different forms and formulations in their chapters. Yet in all cases, they remain invariably bound up with each other. Even though Classical scholars have worked with different, sometimes opposing conceptions of localism, all three positions discussed in this chapter acknowledge the fact that human collective identities articulate themselves not only in universal and general terms but also and in particular in forms of smaller local entities. The attempt to overcome the binary, then, is also an attempt to integrate cultural/symbolic and socio-political approaches to the study of the ancient world. It is ultimately based on the insight that the general cannot really be separated from the particular and vice versa. Culture does not exist outside of the societies that sustain it. In the realm of religion (as elsewhere) both mutually inform each other.

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As this chapter has shown, it is in particular insights into the dynamics of this interplay that the study of the ancient Greek gods, and ancient Greek religion more generally, can contribute to the study of localism in ancient Greece: the oscillation between the particular and the universal in the realm of religion, I would argue, stands for a more general movement between particularism on the one hand and an overriding sense of a shared Hellenicity on the other – a shared sense of Greekness that is more than the sum of its ‘local’ parts.

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McGinty, P. (1978) Interpretation and Dionysus: Method in the Study of a God. London. Mitchell, L. (2007) Panhellenism and the Barbarian in Archaic and Classical Greece. Swansea. Morgan, C. (1993) ‘The Origins of Panhellenism’, in N. Marinatos and R. Hägg (eds.) Greek Sanctuaries: New Approaches. London, 18–44. Müller, C. (2016) ‘Generalization, Transnationalism, and the Local in Ancient Greece’, Oxford Handbooks Online, DOI:10.1093/oxfordhb/ 9780199935390.013.42. Müller, C. O. (1820–24) Geschichte hellenischer Stämme und Städte, 3 volumes. Breslau. Müller, H.-P. (2003) ‘Religion und Regionalität: Theoretisches und Methodisches’, in E. Schwertheim and E. Winter (eds.) Religion und Region: Götter und Kulte aus dem östlichen Mittelmeerraum. Bonn, 1–7. Nilsson, M. P. (1927) Geschichte der Griechischen Religion, 2 volumes. Munich (first published in Swedish in 1922). Osanna, M. (1996) Sanctuari e culti dell’Acaia antica. Naples. Osborne, R. (2011) The History Written on the Classical Greek Body. Cambridge. (2015) ‘Unity vs. Diversity’, in E. Eidinow and J. Kindt (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Greek Religion. Oxford, 11–19. Otto, W. F. (1929) Die Götter Griechenlands: Das Bild des Göttlichen im Spiegel des griechischen Geistes. Bonn. Pakkaneen, P. (2011) ‘Polis within the Polis: Crossing the Boundary of Official and Private Religion at the Sanctuary of Poseidon at Kalaureia on Poros’, in M. Haysom and J. Wallensten (eds.) Current Approaches to Religion in Ancient Greece. Stockholm, 111–34. Parker, R. (1996) Athenian Religion: A History. Oxford. (2005) Polytheism and Society at Athens. Oxford. (2011) On Greek Religion. Oxford. Petridou, G. (2016) Divine Epiphany in Greek Literature and Culture. Oxford. Pirenne-Delforge, V. (2013) L’Aphrodite grecque. Contribution à l’étude de ses cultes et de sa personnalité dans le panthéon archaïque et classique. Athens (2020) Le Polythéisme grec à l’épreuve d’Hérodote. Paris. Pirenne-Delforge, V. and G. Pironti (2022) The Hera of Zeus: Intimate Enemy, Ultimate Spouse, transl. R. Geuss. Cambridge. Pironti, G. and C. Bonnet (eds.) (2017) Les dieux d’Homère: polythéisme et poésie en Grèce ancienne. Liège. Polignac, F. de (1995) ‘Divinités régionales et divinités communautaires dans les cités archaïques’, in V. Pirenne-Delforge (ed.) Les Panthéons des cités, des origines à la Périégèse de Pausanias. Liège, 23–34. Polinskaya, I. (2013) A Local History of Greek Polytheism: Gods, People, and the Land of Aigina, 800–400 BCE. Leiden. Price, S. (1999) Religions of the Ancient Greeks. Cambridge.

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Prückner, H. (1968) Die lokrischen Tonreliefs. Mainz. Richter, N. (2007) ‘The Religious System at Sparta’, in D. Ogden (ed.) A Companion to Greek Religion. Malden, Mass., 236–52. Schachter, A. (1981) Cults of Boiotia. London. (2000) ‘Greek Deities: Local and Panhellenic Identities’, in P. Flensted-Jensen (ed.) Further Studies in the Ancient Greek Polis. Stuttgart, 9–17. Schmidt Pantel, P. (1992) La Cité au banquet: histoire des repas publics dans les cités grecques. Rome. Scott, M. (2010) Delphi and Olympia: The Spatial Politics of Panhellenism in the Archaic and Classical Periods. Cambridge. Sourvinou-Inwood, C. (1978) ‘Persephone and Aphrodite at Locri: A Model for Personality Definitions in Greek Religion’, The Journal of Hellenic Studies 98, 101–21. (2000a) ‘What Is Polis Religion?’, in R. Buxton (ed.) Oxford Readings in Greek Religion. Oxford, 13–37 (first published in 1990). (2000b) ‘Further Aspects of Polis Religion’, in R. Buxton (ed.) Oxford Readings in Greek Religion. Oxford, 38–55 (first published in 1988). Vernant, J. P. (1991) Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays Jean-Pierre Vernant, ed. F. Zeitlin. Princeton, N.J. Versnel, H. S. (1990–93) Inconsistencies in Greek and Roman Religion, 2 volumes. Leiden. Whitmarsh, T. (ed.) (2010) Local Knowledge and Microidentities in the Imperial Greek World. Cambridge.

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Refitting the Local Horizon of Ancient Greek Religion (Including Some Remarks on the Sanctuary of Poseidon on Kalaureia)  

Towering interest in connectivity and globalisation has triggered the need for advanced approaches to the local. In the study of ancient Greek religion, interest in the epichoric context leads to the notorious problem of universal belief and local distinction, and multiple scales in between. Shaped by the confinement to place and a limited number of participants, the local horizon of Greek religion is typically circumscribed as subject to a smallness in importance and meaning; at best, it is viewed as a canvas for the projection of local idiosyncrasy. Following up on Julia Kindt’s exposition of how the local dimension of Greek religion has featured in previous scholarship, this chapter calls for a reassessment of the prevailing orthodoxy. In the first section, Hans Beck gauges the vectors that lent particular, culture-specific traits to the local as a source domain of ancient Greek belief and cult practice. The second part applies the findings to an exemplary case study, the connected world of settlements and sanctuaries in the Saronic Gulf. One of the central nodes in the entangled environment was the Sanctuary of Poseidon at Kalaureia, home to a puzzling amphictyony. Contextualising the site in space and time, Beck argues that Kalaureia gained religious prominence as a satellite sanctuary of the city of Troizen. Close alignment with Troizen continued to be of prime importance in later times, when the Kalaureian amphictyony sought to amplify its role in transregional communications by claiming a time-honoured existence. Kalaureia documents not only the merits of the local perspective, but exemplifies the role of the local as a feeder of religious practice and purpose.

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I am grateful to Julia Kindt, Marian Helm, Sophia Nomicos, and Anton Bonnier for corrections and comments. The members of the EXC Research Cloud ‘Localism and the Local’ at WWU Münster offered invaluable advice on the notion of universality and its role in discourses of authority and power.

Refitting the Local Horizon of Ancient Greek Religion

The Local Horizon: Signifier and Source of Religious Meaning Greek religion, Herodotus observed, was inextricably intertwined with notions of being Greek.1 Common gods and goddesses, mythical traditions, and rituals, the latter grounded in ta hiera, that is, in sacrifice and cult, were among the defining traits of Hellenicity. In the lived experience, these expressions were deeply associated with the everyday horizon in which they were performed. Whether in personal or communal communications with the divine, whether at home or in the city, as followers of secret rites, participants in public sacrifices, or oracle seekers in search of orientation when all other sources of meaning had failed, Greek religious practice was preconditioned by the local. If acting as a community, in the cults and sacrifices of the polis, the conduct of religion was administered by local officials, carried out before the crowd of citizens, and governed by prescriptions that were coated with a particular type of ‘knowing’ and ‘doing things’ that imparted social practice with the guiding force of local custom, or nomos.2 Greek religion was therefore what Robert Parker has famously labelled an ‘embedded religion’.3 It was rooted in its underlying context, subject to encodings in performance and practice. Embeddedment suggests a local dynamic. The exercise of religion was tied to the cults and deities of the local community, to the sacred covenant its people had established with the divine, and to the fortunes this covenant bestowed upon them. Such an embedding poses both analytical and narratological problems. Analytical challenges derive from the fact that the quest for epichoric perspectives is typically performed through the study of literary sources that document a particular local point of view. Yet the presentation of this viewpoint is intertwined with the overarching goals of ancient authors, texts, and literary conventions, including the need for written linearity. Pausanias’ Periēgēsis, so rich in local aperçu and subject to the author’s ideas about Greece’s Classical past, is the most obvious example. In other words, it is not always entirely clear whose local voice resonates in the Periēgēsis (and in the works of other writers for that matter): that of Pausanias, his informants, or local communities, if the local stance is not the expression of literary strategies altogether.4 The

1 2

3 4

Hdt. 8.144.2. See Pindar’s famous notion of custom being king (F 169a Race); in relation to the polis: Xen. Mem. 1.3.1. Parker 1986: 265; cf. Eidinow 2015. See the contribution by Greta Hawes to this volume, Chapter 12.

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narratological problem is not new either. For instance, Walter Burkert, progenitor of the field in its current state, had shaped a notoriously coherent picture of Greek religion. Focusing largely on ritual, sanctuary, and polytheism, Burkert drew an ideal-typical image that has been, and continues to be, immensely influential. The evidence supporting the picture, however, is pieced together almost entirely from diverse places and with, at times, opaque variation. Ritual practice, e.g. sacrifice, prayer, libations, etc., although highly suggestive of an all-pervasive scheme of Greek religion, is both rooted and evidenced by Burkert in its embedded context.5 The assessment of universalism and local practice, and reconciliation of their trajectories, calls for conceptual nuance. As a lived referentiality to universal standards, formulated for instance in holy texts, religion is always subject to the force of ‘inculturation’, since all expressions of universality in word and gesture, time and space, and behavioural codes are subject to sociocultural context. In Religious Studies, the dynamics of such ‘inculturation’ has been detected both in universal religious systems (e.g. Christianity, Buddhism) and in those that are labelled particular, deliberately confining themselves to individual peoples or ethnic groups.6 For instance, controversies in the Catholic Church about the admissibility of local ritual practice has sparked historical inquiry into the universalist claim, which has been found a convenient attempt to defend the Church’s position in society. In the study of early modern Catholicism, at a peak time of missionary movements from the centre to perceived peripheries, recent research has disclosed a wide gulf of transcultural interactions between missionaries and their universalising agenda on the one hand and local communities on the other. Between both poles, the lived reference of Christianity was subject to multiple acts of cultural brokerage. Despite iron-clad narratives of universalism in the past and present, Catholicism is the product of ubiquitous hybridity.7 Greek religion pushes the idea of ‘inculturation’ one step further. Limitation to and interlocking with notions of being Greek lends Greek religion the frame of a particular religious system; it was geared toward the cultural core of Hellenicity. All the while, embeddedment in countless epichoric worlds, each one with its own set of custom and tradition, attests to a curious ‘local inculturation’. How should we conceive of this ‘inculturation’ in relation to common norms, something like Herodotus’ hiera? 5 6

Burkert 1977/1985. On Burkert, cf. also the contribution of Julia Kindt in this volume, Chapter 1. 7 Grundmann et al. 2011. Figl 1993; see also the classic Christian 1981; Amsler et al. 2020.

Refitting the Local Horizon of Ancient Greek Religion

To what extent and according to what criteria should we regard the lived referentiality as a moment of divergence from the shared hiera, as local idiosyncrasy of common conduct? And if the typical thought paradigm of norm and departure from it falls short, would it be more appropriate to see deeply rooted divergence as the weaving pattern in the fabric of Greek religion? Hence, did ‘local inculturation’ provide an organisational principle with a norm of its own? A convenient way out of the dilemma has been found in piecemeal perspectives, that is, in investigative approaches to so-called local religious systems: Athenian religion, Theban religion, Spartan religion, etc. Sometimes this idea is also expressed more generally in reference to Greek religions (plural instead of singular), a signpost of local distinction and diversity.8 But the universal cover of Greek religion was more than a summation of diversity, cult by cult, city by city, polis religion by polis religion. Just like polytheism is not simply the sum of the gods and goddesses of any given pantheon, Greek religion was more than the addition of local fragmentation, pieced together from local systems. In the realm of religion, the local, as I seek to demonstrate in this chapter, had a pervasive quality, an innate condition to generate purpose and agency. Imprinting on universal belief and ritual, the local horizon was an active, integral part of the religious DNA of ancient Greece. As a key concept in the study of networks and connectivity in the ancient Mediterranean, the local paradigm addresses two arenas of spatial semantics: the physical and the imagined realm. As a physical, geographical concept, the local is the manageable, accessible realm through which individuals navigate in their everyday lives. Such an experience implies multiple groups of agents. It expresses itself in a kaleidoscope of functional localities in which group relations are realised, for instance, neighbourhoods, places of artisanal, or agricultural productivity; hence, the distinction between the urban centre and the countryside. Religious and profane places, again associated with demarcated locations in the local’s territory, were also subject to divergent strategies of communal maintenance. The local of the farmer in the countryside was not the same as that of the perfumer in the agora, nor that of the kapēleion-keeper who sold wine to the residents of their neighbourhood. What united these sublocal localities was that they fell in the same radius of quotidian interaction. Rather than assuming neat segregation, for instance between living quarters and 8

The most comprehensive coverage of a local religious system is Parker 1996. See also various contributions to Ogden 2007: part V. For the plural see, e.g., Price 1999.

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production spaces, or between city and hinterland, we are advised to view the local world of the polis as a tapestry of localities that were both malleable and permeable, stitched together into a convoluted syntax of local space.9 As an imagined place, the local’s quality extends the experience to an imaginary circle of individuals and eventually an imagined community. It has long been argued that this metaphorical manifestation is in dialogue with the physical world. But it is also separate from it. We just noted how physical space segregates in that it shapes multiple localities that exist in proximity to and within each other: we observed the existence of multiple functional localities in one and the same local. Social space, on the other hand, in the words of Henri Lefebvre, suggests ‘actual and potential assembly at a single point, or around that point. It implies, there, the possibility of accumulation.’10 The possibility of accumulation is highly contextual. It is informed by real-life constellations, for instance, infrastructure and technology. The natural environment, too, galvanises the idea of accumulation in that it provides a canvas for the projection of social space (a valley, plateau, island, etc.). This is not to suggest that the local environment – its topography, geomorphological features – wields a deterministic force over society. As David Harvey has demonstrated, the social quality of space is defined through human practice and its charge with culture first and foremost, i.e. through an ongoing, complex, and often non-linear negotiation in the course of which space is made subject to and appropriated by the leading ideas of society. Perceptions of the local horizon, no matter how deep the conversation with the physicality of place, are always the product of human imagination.11 Reference to the creativity of human imagination, especially in response to changing circumstances, reminds us that local, contrary to casual understandings, does not suggest stagnation or slowness; rather it is on the contrary. In his examination of Mediterranean microhistories, stretches of land and ‘narrow seas’ within the Mediterranean (the Corinthian Gulf, the Tyrrhenian Sea, and others), Fernand Braudel famously brought to light a striking resilience of local thought and action. The long duration of history in the microrealms of the Mediterranean was out of sync, Braudel argued, with the great waves of histoire événementielle, the history of events

9 11

10 See Beck 2020: 29–40 for a more comprehensive discussion. Lefebvre 1974/1991: 101. Harvey 1979/2006: 275; cf. Crumley, Lennartsson, and Westin 2017.

Refitting the Local Horizon of Ancient Greek Religion

and people who were tied together in the unified space of the Mediterranean. Both histories followed a different pace and trajectory.12 Globalisation theory has fostered a quintessentially post-Braudelian picture in that it advances our understanding of the many, vibrant connections between locally bounded cultures and their resonance in everyday practice: for instance, in securing raw materials, developing crafts, disseminating religious ideas and trading objects, and the conspicuous consumption of imported goods. Drawing on advanced readings of materiality and its entanglement with human practice as it transpires from Cultural Theory, Mediterraneanisation studies shed new light on how people in Greco-Roman antiquity experienced the world and how this experience was shaped by networking activities across the sea. In the tightly meshed networking exchanges between local horizons and microregions, it has been argued, processes of universalisation should not be viewed as heavyhanded developments that force themselves onto defenceless, passive local worlds. Instead, the thrust towards universality is itself subject to localising movements, processes that unfold ‘from below’ rather than ‘top down’ only. Similarly to what we encountered earlier with universalist images uttered by the Catholic Church, Arjun Appadurai warns us not to subscribe to connected master narratives that discount complex combinations of local diversity, difference, and distinction. This view fully appreciates the role of the local as an active and dynamic feeder of universal networking processes. Each end of the binary infiltrated the other, both were dialectically intertwined (hence the notorious glocalism and the glocal). And their relation was exposed to adaptation and change over time.13 To foster a nuanced understanding of the multicoded nature of Greek religion that is appreciative of the local’s qualities, three aspects stand out. As we shall see, all three are closely interrelated, but for our purposes it is best to keep them apart: a) the implicit presence of the divine in the local, captured in the notion of epichoric gods; b) the formative force of place to predicate and deeply permeate local religion; and c) the interplay between evidences of the divine and resonances with human practice, expressed in ritual and rite. Let us discuss these one at a time, with close attention to how each quality of local related to and resonated with the universal constituency of Greek religion.

12 13

Braudel 1949/1979. Appadurai 1996; 2002; see also Concannon and Mazurek 2016 for a post-Braudelian picture. The classic text on Mediterraneanisation is Morris 2005.

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a) Local religion shielded the community in special ways. In the polytheistic world of ancient Greece, the polis and its hinterland were home to countless gods and goddesses. Populating the epichoric world of the community, those figures underwent a complicated translation process from universal to local – Julia Kindt has urgently pointed out the intricacies this translation bestows upon the integrity of the divine persona.14 Hymnic poetry, from the earliest example in the Homeric Hymns, attests to the tendency of heaping up epithets that singled out and specified individual qualities and powers of the addressed goddess (see also under c). In Boiotia alone, a total of nineteen different cults in honour of Apollo have been identified, with an even higher number of local epithets, each one identifying certain character traits exhibited by the god, including Apollo Akraiphios (Akraiphia), Daphnaphorios (Chaironeia), Dalios 15 (Orchomenos), and Paion (Oropos), among others. While some of these were place-based, highlighting the intimate relation between god and venerating community, others evoked certain powers: for instance, Apollo Karykaios, attested from the Archaic period, was a Tanagran appearance in close conversation with the nearby mountain Karykeios, over which and from where Apollo wielded special powers.16 Referencing the ability to control the environment – mountains, rain, the earth, etc. – led to local variations that were coupled and in correspondence with the natural world. In cult, the pool of epithets was as deep as the exercise of ritual and sacrifice itself. Local, in this sense, suggested vivid bonds between humans and the divine. In Thebes, for instance, Apollo Ismenios’ mantic powers were both located in and confined to Thebes; Ismenian Apollo was named after a hill and a Theban local hero, Ismenos, whose pedigree tied the Thebans to their land.17 The radius of Apollo Ismenos’ authority was limited to the city. Many illustrious visitors to the temple on the Ismenian hill, some of them from afar, document the fame factor and the prestige the sanctuary savoured in the Greek world.18 Such translocal 14

15 16

17 18

Julia Kindt in this volume, Chapter 1. See also the first fruits of the ongoing ERC-sponsored Mapping Ancient Polytheisms Network: Bonnet 2021 and her contribution to this volume below in the Epilogue. Cf. Schachter 1981–94: 1.43–90. Ibid.: 1.86, with Paus. 9.20.3 (who prefers Apollo Karykeios, a Theban guise rather than that from Tanagra). Schachter 1981–94: 1.77–85. See also below under c on the Theban hero Ismenos. As evidenced by tripod offerings: see Papazarkadas 2014. Herodotus, who on several occasions reports Athenian and Persian elites making dedications in various Boiotian sanctuaries, had also visited the Ismenion: 5.58–61.

Refitting the Local Horizon of Ancient Greek Religion

communications and connectedness did not, however, undermine the foundational covenant between Apollo Ismenios and the Thebans: the Ismenian qualities of Apollo commenced only in their city. Others might travel to Thebes for oracular advice, but Ismenian Apollo did not travel to them. Such limitation, on the other hand, made Apollo in his Theban guise particularly meaningful, if not commanding, to the inhabitants of the city. Local worship was thus energised by an intriguing circle of self-assurance: as the realm of Apollo’s divine authority and protection coincided with the boundaries of their city, the Thebans enjoyed exclusive privileges from venerating Ismenian Apollo. Their veneration followed traditions and prescriptions that were subject to the guiding force of nomos, or the local ways, which further endorsed the idea of exclusivity. Among these was the practice of dedicating tripods to the god. Tripods were common dedicatory objects, in use in multiple sites and sanctuaries of Aegean Greece. In Boiotia, the ritual use of tripod cauldrons was widespread; so widespread that scholars regard the Theban practice as critical to the development and tenacity of the universal paradigm. It fused Greek dedicatory practices with local context.19 The epichoric gods as we encounter them here were on a firm footing. In Suppliants, Aischylos speaks of ‘the gods who possess the land’ and of δαιμόνες ἐγχώριοι, that is, ‘spirits in the land’ who exercise authority over the people.20 The meaning of ἐγχώριος resembles that of its cognate ἐπιχώριος; both relate to the native land of the polis, its chōra. But the prefixes also attest to semantic nuance. Whereas ἐπιχώριος designates something ‘of the land’, with a formidable breadth of meaning, from cultural output to agrarian produce and mythical traditions, all at the local level, the usage of ἐγχώριος appears more restrictive. The literal translation ‘in the chōra’ or ‘in the land’ may or may not invoke overtones of indigeneity, but on the whole it is fair to assert that ἐγχώριος is used specifically to describe the state of something that is in the land. Unlike the more concrete semantic of ἐγχώριος, ἐπιχώριος fleshes out a deep, ontological relation between the land and its epichoric constituents.21 Thucydides, on a prominent occasion in his History, further explicates the cohabitation of people and the divine. The scene is set in the countryside of Plataia in 430/429 BCE, where the Spartan army under King Archidamos has pitched its camp to launch an assault. The Plataians, in distress, send envoys that remind the Spartans of a previous exchange of

19

Papalexandrou 2008.

20

Aesch. Supp. 704–05; 482.

21

Beck 2020: 29.

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oaths whereby the Plataians were protected. These oaths were witnessed ‘by our gods in the land’ (θεοὺς ἡμετέρους ἐγχωρίους) as well as ‘the gods of your [i.e. the Spartans’] fathers’ (θεοὺς ὑμετέρους πατρῴους).22 The plea, it is well known, falls flat and the Spartans attack, but before the first blow is delivered the gods are invoked again. This time, the Spartan king is the speaker, who calls ‘the gods and heroes in the country’ (καὶ θεῶν καὶ ἡρώων τῶν ἐγχωρίων) to witness, as they hold the land of Plataia.23 Irene Polinskaya has explained that the distinction made here between the gods in the land of the Plataians and the gods in somebody else’s land (the Spartans’ in this case) is carefully made. It acknowledges both the place that is addressed and the positionality of the speaker. When the Plataian envoys speak of their own land and the divine spirits that reside in it, they emphasise their ties through reference to the ἐπιχώριοι θεοί. The Spartans had their own gods in their land, but that is not at stake to the Plataians, nor is the conflict about the land of the Spartans; hence, when the Plataians reference the Spartan gods, they are called ‘the gods of your fathers’. Archidamos subscribes to this perspective by evoking the Plataian gods and heroes as ἐπιχώριοι θεοί also, the gods in the land before him, where the war parties are currently assembled. As the debate unfolds, the city and countryside of Plataia are conceived of as an environment populated by humans and divine beings alike. Its main quality is that it provides the backdrop to the existential relation between the people and their gods.24 In this rendering, the local horizon was not simply reduced to a canvas for smallness, segregation, and idiosyncrasy. As a realm of believed accumulation, the local was indicative of place-based relations between humans and the divine, a setup in which the land obtained a genuine epichoric quality. The first innate quality of a Greek local religious system that we encounter here was that each of these systems, rather than adding up to the completion of a jigsaw, was powered by and, in turn, subscribed to a peculiar logic of local. The universal horizon drew on the formative force of place. b) This becomes even clearer when we explore the ways in which physical manifestations of the local structured and lent meaning to religious practice: to cult objects, their application in complex sequences of rituals and in rite, to individual sites, and to religious belief overall. Reference to the epichoric gods was a common exercise; the circle of

22 24

23 Thuc. 2.71.4. Thuc. 2.74.2. See the discussion of the passage by Polinskaya 2013: 36–43.

Refitting the Local Horizon of Ancient Greek Religion

potentially evoked deities was all-inclusive, comprising gods and goddesses, Olympian and Chthonian alike, heroes, spirits, and other divine beings, all of which might be subsumed under the umbrella of ἐπιχώριοι θεοί. A more specific group among these were nature deities whose presence correlated with and was inspired by the topography and environment of the polis and its chōra – its landmark features, geophysical characteristics, and microclimatic conditions. The term nature deity itself is a slight misnomer since all deities in Greek religion were somehow connected with natural phenomena: we already noted the inherent ability of divine figures, expressed in their epithets, to control, e.g. thunder, rain, and wild beast, or rule over mountains.25 The materiality of the local was part and parcel of the religious communication. Recent scholarship on Kultlandschaften, or sacred landscapes, has brought to life the rich cross-fertilisation between the natural environment, human imagination, and religious belief.26 Tied to place, in unmovable fashion and seemingly since time immemorial, natural features of the land – rivers and waterfalls, caves, groves, trees – have their own attraction, radiating with stimuli to the human senses. When fused with imaginaries of divine presence, environmental landmarks are susceptive to heterotopic qualities, i.e. they transform into discursive realms, intense, soothing, and sometimes disturbing, which facilitates complex exchanges between nature and religion, inspiring the latter with the morphology of the former. Deities residing in those places drew specific qualities from the environment. In turn, their boundedness in a set locality not only complemented the ontological character of the ἐπιχώριοι θεοί, but it called for types of veneration that followed, once again, the logic of place. For instance, mountains and rivers, it has been stated by many, played a critical role in belief and ritual. Many cities venerated their rivers and springs, sources of life and meaning alike; in some cases, they accorded their own sacred precinct. In the new cult law from fifth-century Arkadia, three different rituals in the worship of Alpheios are enumerated; depending on the understanding of the fragmented text, the river god was either venerated by one city in three festivals or by three cities and sanctuaries, each one conducting its own sacrifices to Alpheios.27

25 26

27

See now Larson 2019 on concept of Greek nature deities. See Wiemer 2019; Beck forthcoming b; see also the output of the Unlocking Sacred Landscapes Research Network, www.ucy.ac.cy/unsala. Alpheios, Carbon and Clackson 2016: lines 1, 4, and 12; Beck 2020: 156–60; Ganter 2021. See, more generally, Bremmer 2019 and Burkert 1977/1985: 174.

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Liturgy and ritual practice were themselves reflective of and in correspondence with the local environment. At times, local natural phenomena inspired specific ways of veneration. In Phlious, in the north-eastern corner of the Peloponnese, an aversion ritual warded the vine stocks from frost damage; local climatic conditions in the Phlious basin were particularly risky to vines at the time of the rising constellation of the Goat.28 Veneration of Gaia and Meter, goddesses of the earth and associated with notions of boundedness, bears ample witness to this. Carved into the otherwise unwrought rock, temenē for Meter typically comprised small shrines for the placement of dedicatory reliefs into the ground. The cult of goddess earth was subject to the morphology of the site. Place set the stage for idiosyncratic veneration.29 A striking and in many ways paradigmatic case can be extrapolated from another cult law, the famous inscription that records the march of a Milesian cult-ordinance on the Sacred Way from Miletos to Didyma. The Sanctuary of Apollo at Didyma was widely connected; its network relations enhanced its prestige in the Greek world.30 At the same time, the inscription, which dates from the mid-fifth century BCE, makes it obvious that the sanctuary was a local quantity of its own.31 The law describes how the socalled Molpoi, addressed as ‘crown-bearers’ (στεφανηφόροι), traversed the distance between the city and Didyma. The relevant passage pays close attention to the topographical features along the way, and how each of these inspired localised acts of reverence. As they departed from the city, [t]wo sacred stones [γύλλοι] with garlands are carried, one is placed beside the image of Hekate before the gates [of Miletos] and a libation of undiluted wine is poured; the other is put beside the doors in Didyma. After this they walk along the plateau until the road hits the hills, from there up into the woods. And they sing paians first at the image of Hekate before the gates, before Dynamis [between the city and the summit], then to the nymphs in the meadow on the hilltop, then at the altar of Hermes Kelados, then to Phylios near Keraiites, then before the statues of Chares. 28 29 30

31

Paus. 2.13.4; Beck 2020: 11–18. Earth/Gaia: Harrison 1927, 396–415. Meter: Burkert 1977/1985: 177–78; Kerschner 2020. Fontenrose 1988: 28–30 is concise; see also Mohr 2013: 59–64 and, most notably, the exhaustive study by Herda 2006. SEG 36.694 from Olbia (ca. 525–500 BCE) sheds curious light on the connectivity of the sanctuary in the late Archaic period. The inscription is dated after an eponymous magistrate in the opening section (line 1), an aisymnētēs named Philtes, son of Dionysios, whose term in office service is otherwise attested for the year 450/449 BCE. The surviving stēlē is a copy from the second century BCE of the initial law that was put up in the Delphinion in Miletos, the cult seat of the Molpoi. Cf. Herda 2006: 9 for a list of previous editions. Philtes: Milet I.3.122, lines 1–77.

Refitting the Local Horizon of Ancient Greek Religion

And near Keraiites they offer a skinned [sheep] in the all-sacrifice year, and to Phylios they offer incense [or a sacrificial cake] every year.32

The procession of the Molpoi aligned with the local environment. Archaeologists were able to trace most of the Sacred Way, disclosing its longest stretches of the ca. 16.5 km between the city and the sanctuary. The hilltop mentioned in the text has been identified with the summit of the Stephania ridge. The halt for praise to the nymphs there has also been discovered. In a meadow that is situated just before the highest elevation, the remains of a sanctuary and a spring were found, together with a votive sculpture, a seated figure inscribed to the nymphs. Toward the end of the journey, along the final stretch of the road, the remains of the statues of Chares have been excavated.33 The combination of evidence from epigraphical and archaeological discoveries helps us to understand how the ritual was governed by place. Note how the religious narrative was inspired by the physicality of the chōra. The individual sections of the journey were all associated with epichoric deities and local heroes: the first stretch with Dynamis, presumably the personification of magisterial ‘Power’ at Miletos. The ridge and hilltop were home to local nymphs. Descending from the Stephania hill, the following leg was hemmed with altars of Hermes, with the local epithet Kelados, and Phylios, presumably a local hero. In the final section, the Chares group, while initially set up in honour of a local ruler from the sixth century, obtained the status of heroic worship over time. With this, the ensemble was further charged with local meaning.34 At each site, the procession offered prayers, songs, and sacrifice: to Hekate, goddess of crossroads and entrance-ways, when the journey began traversing the space outside the urban centre; throughout the countryside, with reverence to several local heroes and nymphs; and at the final destination of their trip, when the second holy stone was placed beside the doors in Didyma. Reverence to heroes and spirits in prayer and song not only reinforced the local cult, it also magnified the religious experience. Note the offerings to Phylios. Depending on whether he was honoured with an incense sacrifice or the offering of a flat cake, in each case the preparation will have followed a local recipe.35 It has been pointed out that the

32 34

35

33 Milet 1.3.133 = LSCG 50, lines 25–31. See Herda 2006; Mohr 2013: 62–63. On Chares and his initial statue group from ca. 575 to 550 BCE, Fontenrose 1988: 166; Herda 2006: 327–28. Worship of the nymphs on the hilltop is independently attested by the remains of a seated figure inscribed to the nymphs; see Ehrhardt 1993; Larson 2001: 201–02. Offering to Phylios, Fontenrose 1988: 167–68; Herda 2006: 315–17.

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consumption of wine along the route is not attested to in the document, and it is conceivable that no alcohol was consumed throughout. But at least the pouring of libations at the beginning and end of the journey entailed the use of (presumably local) wine in the ritual. Libations, whether poured over the flames on the altar or into the ground for ‘the earth to drink’, were an effective mode of communication with the gods through the elements, air and soil respectively.36 It has been argued that among the main functions of the procession was the desire to connect the outlying sanctuary of Didyma with the centre of the polis at Miletos. The ritual was thus in line with a developing sense of territoriality among the Milesians; as such, it subscribed to the idea of centrifugal processions to sanctuaries in the countryside, for instance to Eleusis, the Theban Galaxion, or the Argive Heraion.37 At the same time, it speaks to the relation between the local and the exercise of religious practice. The procession adhered to a local dynamic: its religious props were locally encoded, their application subject to a regime of local custom. Moreover, the local horizon wielded impact over the ritual. In the religious system at Miletos, the cult activity of the Molpoi was governed by the physicality of the land, which provided the ceremony with a stage for religious conduct and filled it with local meaning. The Molpoi inscription hints at yet another aspect of the localising connection between place and religion, that is, the sacred aura of cult props and objects made from and in meaningful conversation with local materials. In Hermione, the abundance of porphyry sea snails and corresponding processes of seashell farming resonated with local cult practices at the temple of Aphrodite Pontia and Limenia, where the housings of the animals played a key ceremonial role.38 Another curious example comes from Hyettos in northern Boiotia. Rich in deposits of magnetic iron ore, the land around the city was used in Classical antiquity for various mining activities. The exploitation of magnetite is traceable also in the local ceramic production, which underscores its importance in multiple branches of the local mixed economy. Pliny, following a source from the late fourth century BCE, identified distinct features of magnetic ores from Hyettos to which he also assigned certain healing capacities.39 The people

36 37 38

39

Aesch. Cho. 164; cf. Herda 2006: 326. Eleusis: Mohr 2013: 65–70; Thebes: Schachter 2000/2016; Argos: de Polignac 1984/1995: 41–45. Paus. 2.34.9–11; Pirenne-Delforge 1994: 186–87; Beck 2020: 98; cf. Theodoropoulou 2013. See also the contribution by Diana Burton to this volume, Chapter 6. Plin. HN 36.128.

Refitting the Local Horizon of Ancient Greek Religion

of Hyettos picked up on this. In a local sanctuary that was also visited for healing purposes, Pausanias saw an old cult image that he describes as a shapeless, unpolished stone (λίθος).40 This somewhat crude appearance should not be mistaken for negligence or carelessness. On the contrary, to the people of Hyettos, the λίθος, most likely a chunk of iron ore, was the embodiment of divine presence in their land, an epichoric manifestation of the god. Presumably the lump was not as inspirational as a pleasant spring or a shadowy grove, yet no matter how cumbersome its appearance, to the people of Hyettos it was a witness to the sacred covenant with the gods in their land.41 c) As key expressions in the relation with the gods, rituals and rite were not only performed in the same local space where those ties commenced, but they brought the coexistence between humans and the divine to light. They made it visible, experienceable. The third character trait of local religion in its Greek variant is its quality to create an ambience of directness and presence that, in the very moment of ritual conduct, superimposed the segregating forces of space and time. There are countless examples that speak to the convergence and simultaneity of realms of religious conduct and divine presence, and the localising quality that emanated from both. We already noted how the Molpoi, emblematic of many other procession rites, paid homage to each topographical feature of the chōra and its divine spirits. Most eminently, their libations were inseparable from hymnic invocation and prayer that localised the god or goddess. Prayer brought the divine to the assembled community; the Greek word for ‘to pray’ (εὔχομαι) captures the semantics of drawing divine attention to those who have come together in worship.42 With no set liturgical formula to begin prayer, careful diligence was placed on the epiclesis, the quest for the correct name and epithetic powers of the addressee – a notoriously ‘tricky part of polytheism’. From many sources, we hear of oracles being asked to which divine figure sacrifice and prayer might be addressed in order to secure divine support.43 In his Hymn for the Thebans in Honour of Zeus, Pindar calls out the full slate of recipients to craft an evocative space: ‘Shall it be Ismenos, or Melia of the golden spindle, or Kadmos, of the holy race of Spartoi, of Thebe of the dark-blue fillet, or the all-daring strength of Herakles, or the wonderous honour of Dionysos, or the marriage of white-armed Harmonia that we shall hymn?’44 The 40 42 44

41 Paus. 9.24.3. Étienne and Knoepfler 1976: 178–81, 200–01. 43 Burkert 1977/1985: 73–75. See Versnel 1981; quotation, Furley 2010: 123. Pind. fr. 29, 1–7; transl. W. H. Race.

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epiclesis is a blissful reminder of how prayer and song orbited around the local horizon, not by means of a religious dogma, but as a point of fateful convergence with the divine in place. Pindar praises Kadmos, legendary founder of Thebes as well as the notorious Spartoi: Thebes’ famed warrior race that was born from the teeth of a dragon after Kadmos had slaughtered the animal and sown them into the ground.45 Melia was a local nymph with whom Apollo sired the Theban hero Teneros, name-giver of the Teneric plain toward the north of the city. Melia’s quality as a naiad nymph vouched for the connection to the soil. The habitat of nymphs was typically associated with trees and groves or wells that, through the presence of the divine, obtained heterotopic qualities (above, under b). In Melia’s case, her spring was commonly considered identical with the Spring of Ares near the Ismenian Hill and, hence, the very location where Kadmos had encountered the dragon and planted its teeth.46 A similar connection to the land was made through Thebe, eponymous nymph of another spring in Thebes and daughter of another nature deity, the rivergod Asopos. Finally, Dionysos and Herakles, of wonderous honour and alldaring strength respectively, received particular veneration in Thebes; both were, according to local traditions, born in Thebes itself.47 The opening lines of the hymn were thus a hyper-summation of the ties the Thebans had to the land, metaphorical, relational, and in ritual. Pindar’s audience is reminded that its sacred covenant with the divine was inscribed into and vouched for by the environment of the polis. When Pindar, in the conclusion to the epiclesis, recalls the wedding of Harmonia and Kadmos, an event that was reported to have happened in the same spot where Kadmos had performed the ktisis (founding) of Thebes, in the presence of all the gods and goddesses, the evocation represented the attachment to the land as vital to the new civic order.48 Chorus performances of song and dance, the context in which Pindar’s Hymn was most likely sung and so ubiquitous a form of religious worship, facilitated a unique fusion of people and place. Leslie Kurke has fully captured this quality, observing that Greek chorality was a ‘machine for the production of pure presence, conjuring the gods and merging chorus members and audience alike with the divine for the space of the 45

46 47

48

Vian 1963; Kühr 2006: 109–12, 160–61, 201–02; Berman 2015: 131–34; Beck forthcoming a: sections 4.1.10 and 5.1. Pind. Pyth. 11.4–6; f. 52k Race; Larson 2001: 142. Already the Iliad (14.323–26) declares Thebes the birthplace of Herakles and Dionysos; see Beck forthcoming a: sections 11.2 and 11.3. Thebe: Kühr 2006: 207–08; Berman 2015: 13–14. Kühr 2006: 106–14, with further references; Beck 2020: 55–57.

Refitting the Local Horizon of Ancient Greek Religion

performance’.49 When the gods were evoked in prayer, the time–space continuum shrunk, it melted into the local horizon. This characteristic trait of Greek religion, therefore, clearly magnified the role of and attachment to the local, an attachment that was foundational to the ways in which communities fashioned themselves in the conduct of their ἱερά.

The Sanctuary of Poseidon at Kalaureia and the Saronic Region: Sails and Scales Evidence from the Saronic Gulf informs and complicates this concept of local religion. When Plato famously described the Greeks as settling along the shores of the Mediterranean like frogs around a pond, the Saronic was a miniature model of the metaphor.50 The gulf region comprises a complex mosaic of geographical and geomorphological features that provide for a rich canvas of local diversity in a relatively small natural environment. Only about one quarter of the Saronic’s perimeter is open towards the Mediterranean; from southern Attica, stepping stones into the Aegean are the islands of Kea, Kythnos, Seriphos, Siphnos, and Melos. The other three quarters are surrounded by coastscapes – counterclockwise, Attica, the Megarid and Corinthia, and the Argolid. In many locations, the land rises ruggedly from the sea; sometimes, for instance from the Isthmus near Corinth south and around Methana, steep coastal formations make the land difficult to access, except for some small and naturally secluded bays. These inlets, in turn, mark the beginning (or end) of swathes of communication inland, passages through a rocky terrain: in Epidauros, connections from the sea condense in a small and protected harbour from where they segue into the natural road through the central Argolid toward Nauplion and Argos. In the northern Saronic, the Bay of Eleusis merges into a similar corridor that extends into Boiotia.51 Rarely does the terrain give way to larger coastal plains. In the south-western quadrant, the fertile plains around Troizen are one of the few extensive stretches of wideopen lands. In general, the geomorphological outlook of the coastlines along the Peloponnesian shores and on Aigina has been subject to dynamic shifts from antiquity to the present day, elicited by local tectonism and eustatic sea level changes.52 49 51 52

50 Kurke 2012: 218. Pl. Phd. 109b. Argolis: Tausend 2006: 149–52. Eleusis corridor: Beck forthcoming a: section 4.1.4. See Mourtzas and Kolaiti 2013.

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Enclosure in part makes the Saronic a relatively steady, pleasant environment for maritime travel. Typical sailing conditions pose low to medium challenges to the experienced navigator.53 Winds blow fairly consistently and at a moderate level of two to three Bft from north to north-east. In the summer months, the Meltemi picks up speed to four to six Bft; only occasionally do winds reach greater than eight Bft, mostly in winter. Swiftly changing weather conditions and heavy seas, so characteristic of the Cycladic island world, are by and large absent from the Saronic. Sea travel is further eased by small and naturally sheltered bays with ample opportunity for safe anchorage or the landing of boats: the natural harbours of Hermione, Epidauros, Korphos, and Nisaia are good examples. Today, the relative protectedness of these coastscapes provides ideal conditions for commercial fishing farms. Interspersed in this environment are multiple islands: Aigina, the largest island located in the centre; Angistri to the west and Salamis further north, the second largest island; and Methana and Poros south of Aigina, the former a quasi-island, connected to the mainland via a 250 m land bridge, the latter an island in the strict sense yet cut off from Galatas in the Argolid only by a narrow watercourse. Only three kilometres to the north-west lies Pogon (‘Beard’), the ancient harbour of Troizen. Poros itself is an island pair, comprising Kalaureia and the much smaller islet Sphairia (the two are connected by a bridge over the narrow strait). At the southern edge of the Saronic, toward Hydra and Spetses, where the wind patterns change, the maritime microregion is convoluted by promontories, islets, and rock formations – so convoluted, in fact, that travel authors from antiquity to the early modern period have found it difficult to identify them in their writings. Exchanges across the gulf are alleviated by relative proximity and viewsheds between locations. Fog and overcast are rare, except for the typical fair weather cauliflower cumulus that form as the day progresses. Especially in the summer months, there is a pristine clarity in the air that allows for horizontal visibility up to six kilometres from the deck of a sail ship. Higher elevations are of course detectable at much greater distances. Aigina is visible from almost all coastlines of the Saronic perimeter. Mount Oros (531m), in a commanding position in the island centre, is both a potent landmark and an indicator of local weather conditions: clouds gathering

53

As witnessed by a team of scholars from the universities of Münster, Cardiff, and King’s College London (Hans Beck, Sophia Nomicos, Marian Helm, Alex McAuley, Irene Polinskaya) who sailed the Saronic from 30 August to 14 September 2019. The objective was to experience pathways of communication and connectivity across the region. Skippers were Dieter Arrenberg and Jörg Schütte.

Refitting the Local Horizon of Ancient Greek Religion

Figure 2.1 The Saronic Gulf: natural environment and major sites in the Classical Age.

around its steeply rising peak have been, since antiquity, a sure sign of rain.54 Short distances complement the picture. Across the water, virtually no location is distanced from Aigina (Kolona) more than 30 km, allowing mariners to orient themselves in a corresponding grid of sightlines between islands and coasts. The impression is one of omnipresent spatial entanglement. For instance, recent research on viewsheds on Methana and Troizen has brought to light visual awareness of the movement of ships, fisheries, and harbour activities not only across the countryside, but also radiating out, extending over larger sections of the western quadrant of the Saronic.55 Short distance and easy orientation facilitate lively maritime mobility. On land, where communications are varied by differences between travel on flat ground, climbs, or the crossing of rivers and runlets, John Bintliff has established a radius of daily commutes between city and countryside of up to ca. five kilometres, at times more. The Bintliff Diameter translates into an average polis size of ca. 120 km2, comprising the urban centre and

54

Cf. Theophr. Sign. 1.24; Polinskaya 2013: 322.

55

McHugh 2017: 120–31.

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surrounding chōra, although this figure should be read of course in the context of significant variation. In Central Greece and the Peloponnese, which are particularly representative of this scenario, regular distances of inter-polis exchanges amount to ca. 20–25 km of travel between cities; hence, up to a day’s journey. If the transportation of cargo is involved, distances might not be coverable within a day.56 A different picture surfaces across the Saronic. Based on combined data from Early Bronze Age sailing conditions and distances referenced above, Tom Tartaron has calculated that trips between any two locations in the Saronic, under normal conditions, were manageable in a single day, while many round trips were possible in a day or less. Even in the case of doldrums, most places were located within the 40 km range of paddled longboats, as has been established by Bronze Age scholars. In other words, exchanges across the Saronic were faster than on land and the radius of daily interactions wider, while transaction costs and associated risks along established routes were generally low. All these aspects accoutre the gulf region with the main characteristics of a narrow sea in Braudel’s sense; they turn it into an organic whole. This inherent quality, perceived already by ancient authors, makes the Saronic a perfect test-case in the dynamic field of Mediterraneanisation studies. It is a world of connected local places, diverse, often discrete, and stitched into the entangled horizon of the sea.57 This backdrop is critical to the Sanctuary of Poseidon at Kalaureia and its role in religious communications across the Saronic region. The name Kalaureia, used for the island (ca. 31 km2) and settlement, is itself inspired by place. It recalls a pleasant natural ambience or fair winds (‘Gentle Breeze’), or both. The ancient city was located on a flat hilltop, its surface kidney-shaped and ca. 185 m asl. The sandy bay below (Vagionia Bay) is well sheltered and ideal to beach smaller vessels. This is a likely candidate for the site Ps-Skylax (52) described as limēn, ‘harbour’.58 From the natural harbour, the sanctuary can be reached in a short but intensive climb. Today, the area is permeated with small agricultural terraces. A magnificent view reveals itself from the sanctuary across the Saronic, with Methana, Angistri, and Aigina in full sight. On a clear day, the coast of Attica is visible at a 40 km distance. In the back, towards the island, the

56 57 58

Bintliff 2006, with much bibliography; see Beck 2020: 29–40. Tartaron 2013: 213–16. Ancient perceptions: Strabo 8.6.4; Paus. 2.30.7; Plin. HN 4.9. Ps-Skylax. 52. The bay appears too small, however, to harbour fleets such as the one of Timotheos in 374 BCE (60 vessels, see Dem. Tim.). Alternatively, the inlet on the opposite side of the ridge might have served as anchor place, but it is generally less sheltered.

Refitting the Local Horizon of Ancient Greek Religion

Figure 2.2 Kalaureia, view from the plateau north toward the natural harbour. From left to right, Methana, Angistri, and Aigina are visible on the horizon. © Hans Beck.

rolling landscape blends into the mountains of the Peloponnese, interrupted only by the Galatas watercourse. The Temple of Poseidon stands close to the edge of the hilltop. Like the sanctuaries of Aphaia on Aigina and of Poseidon at Cape Sounion in Attica, the temple made the bold visual statement of a site both to look out from and to be seen. Precisely when this statement was first formulated is difficult to assert. The foundations date from the second half of the sixth century BCE, ca. 540 to 510; we will turn to this shortly. The late Archaic structures mark, however, only one, and a relatively late, development in the long history of the site. Scarce remains of two house or tomb structures along with small samples of pottery document human activity in the late Mycenaean period.59 It is uncertain whether the site was sacred to Poseidon in the Late Bronze Age already. Later Greek associations of Poseidon as god of the sea, earthquakes, and horses have, as has been

59

Mycenaean activity: see already Wide and Kjellberg 1896: 297–302. Pharaklas 1972: 20, suggests a cultic site.

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demonstrated by specialists in Mycenaean religion, a Late Bronze Agepedigree. In the Peloponnese, Poseidon is, for instance, attested to have had a conspicuous sanctuary at Pylos that is specified in the Linear B record as recipient of precious offerings.60 On Kalaureia, association with Poseidon becomes visible only in sources from later times. Among the finds from excavations by Swedish archaeologists in 1894 is a miniature trident from bronze, possibly an attachment to a Poseidon statuette.61 Local epigraphic evidence from the Hellenistic period identifies the island as sacred to Poseidon.62 In the literary tradition, the sanctuary is attributed to Poseidon by Strabo and Pausanias.63 Neither the inscriptions on site nor the literary sources mention an epiclesis. In an Attic decree from 423/422 BCE, an Athenian sanctuary of Ποσειδῶν Καλαυρεάτης is referenced, which was most likely an offshoot of the cult across the Saronic.64 If this is indeed the case, the association with Poseidon is attested from Classical times. The toponymic epithet Καλαυρεάτης would have captured the epichoric quality of Poseidon’s guise, highlighting the sacred protection the god wielded over the island.65 Material evidence from the sanctuary and settlement has been scarce. The downside to smooth accessibility is that the site has been susceptive not only to exploitations by the inhabitants of Poros, but also to raiders from further off.66 Understanding of the area was advanced substantially, however, with the second wave of archaeological field work launched by the Swedish Institute in Athens, initiated in 1997 and ongoing. Excavations have brought to light a gradual increase in site activity from Late Geometric times. From ca. 750, pottery finds extend over almost the entire plateau, which suggests clusters of habitation in various locations. All the while, from the late eighth century excavators have detected a functional shift of the later temple area towards a sacred site. The nucleation of the cult complex, traceable in diverse groups of material evidence, is complemented by the relatively swift disappearance of traces of domestic life from the area. Roof tiles and the remains of a terrace wall from ca. 650 might have been associated with a precursor of the late Archaic temple. The steady increase

60

61 63 65 66

Mylonopoulos 2003: 250–51 (see also 35–40 on Helike); Shelmerdine 2016: 283; cf. Susan Lupack’s contribution to this volume, Chapter 3. 62 Wide and Kjellberg 1896: 311. IG IV 842; see below; see also IG IV 843, 845. 64 Strabo 8.6.14; Paus. 2.33.2. IG I3 369, line 74. Mylonopoulos 2003: 80–81; Figueira 2004: 623. Including Kilikian pirates in the first century BCE. Around 1760, much of the temple was carried off by stone raiders to Hydra; see Welter 1941: 43.

Refitting the Local Horizon of Ancient Greek Religion

in cult vessels and terracottas as well as bioarchaeological material (seashells from edible species and decorative tun shells) captures the concentration of ritual activity at the time. In the second half of the sixth century, this led to the erection of the famous peripteral Temple of Poseidon with six by twelve columns (14.5 by 27 m), constructed from local poros limestone and surrounded by a low peribolos wall.67 Some twenty metres south-east of the corner of the peribolos wall, excavators made the spectacular find of three unfinished column drums, deposited against the external face of an Archaic wall that demarcated the boundary of the sacred precinct; the pieces were hidden under the surface of a previously unexcavated sector of the archaeological site. Pottery in the fill as well as the inscribed masons’ marks date the pieces to the second half of the sixth century. Given their impressive size (the lower diameter of the largest unit is 1.117m), the drums were most likely intended for a monumental freestanding votive column. Based on calculations of the elliptical curve fitted to the surviving drum diameters, the Swedish team has calculated a height of ca. nine metres, plus capital and corresponding votive statue. The imposing project thus ranked among the most notable votive columns at the time, the sphinx column from the Sanctuary of Aphaia on Aigina and the tropaion of Marathon. Complementing the construction works of the Temple of Poseidon carried out more or less simultaneously, the drums provide additional testimony to the succession of late-Archaic ‘reorganisation of sacred space’ and the dynamic with which this was pursued. By implication, the monumental evidence suggests a thorough remodelling of Kalaureia in the late sixth century, fuelled by the desire to amplify the sanctuary’s voice in religious communications across the sea.68 Kalaureia’s path in the Late Geometric and Archaic periods was deeply interwoven with the development in the Saronic. Life in the sanctuary was, quite obviously, informed by religious convergences as they become detectable from ca. 800. For instance, the growing prominence of Poseidon on Poros resonated with the rise of Poseidon sanctuaries in Isthmia and Cape Sounion; ritual activity in both sites evolved steadily over the course of the eighth century. Beyond the edges of the Saronic, the sacred precincts of Poseidon in Geraistos on southern Euboia and Tainaron in the most southern location of the Peloponnese marked two more remote points of

67 68

Cf. Wells et al. 2005; 2006–07; Penttinen et al. 2009; Theodoropoulou 2009; Mylona 2015. Pakkanen 2009.

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Figure 2.3 Late Archaic reorganisation of sacred space: site map detailing the southeastern corner of the peribolos wall of the Temple of Poseidon and the find-spot of Archaic column drums discovered during the 2007–09 excavation programme. Deposits along the long terrace wall (Wall 49) mark the largest accumulation of Archaic material so far. Illustration from Alexandridou 2013: 82 (drawing by E. Savini). Courtesy of the Swedish School at Athens.

correspondence.69 The site of Tainaron is also a reminder that within the Peloponnese, from Late Geometric times, worship of the earth-shaker was subject to and inspired by a swiftly expanding network of Poseidon sanctuaries.70 Evidence from quotidian experiences complements this picture. The workmen who left their building instructions or price tags on the aforementioned unfinished column drums in Kalaureia have been identified not as locals; ‘more likely, (they) came from Aigina, Athens, or Megara.’71 The large deposit of Archaic pottery (seventh to fifth centuries) 69

70

Sounion: Goette 2000: 18–21; Theodoropoulou-Polychroniadis 2015. Isthmia: Gebhard 1993: 156–59; 2011; see also the contribution by Tulsi Parikh to this volume, Chapter 5. Euboia and Tainaron: Schumacher 1993; see also Mylonopoulos 2006. 71 See Mylonopoulos 2003. Pakkanen 2009: 169.

Refitting the Local Horizon of Ancient Greek Religion

retrieved from the fill of the nearby border wall, accumulated toward its carefully constructed outer face, includes fine-decorated, black-glazed, coarse ware (oil and cosmetic containers, plastic animal vases, drinking, carrying, and mixing vessels) as well as some human and animal figurines. Despite the generally poor condition of the material, ceramicists are confident to posit the close coexistence and indeed amalgamation of finds from different stylistic backgrounds, including pieces from Corinthian, Laconian, Attic, Aiginetan, and local Troizenian workshops.72 These examples document how the materiality of religion at Kalaureia was in lively conversation with others, that is, how the local worship of Poseidon resonated with experiences from network exchanges across the Saronic and beyond. Strabo, in his Geography, catches an instructive case of connectivity. Surveying the terrain of Troizen and surroundings, he observes that Poseidon and Apollo/Leto in time immemorial had traded islands: Poseidon received Kalaureia for Delos, once his possession; in similar vein, Delphi and Tainaron had switched owners so that the former ultimately came into Apollo’s fold and the latter to Poseidon’s.73 The reference was drawn from Ephoros, whom Strabo cites with a corresponding oracle.74 The issue clearly reverberated conversations about religious connections and, presumably, primordial authority between various stakeholders, including Athens/Delos and Delphi. Shifting interests in interstate affairs found expression in traditions of mythological trades between gods of religious realms, so the notion itself is not unusual.75 Strabo then continues with the statement that ‘there was some amphictyony relating to the sanctuary (of Poseidon) of seven cities who shared in the sacrifices’ (ἦν δὲ καὶ Ἀμφικτυονία τις περὶ τὸ ἱερὸν τοῦτο ἑπτὰ πόλεων αἳ μετεῖχον τῆς θυσίας).76 The member-list is spelled out as follows: ‘Hermione, Epidauros, Aigina, Athens, Prasiai, Nauplion, and Minyan Orchomenos.’ Strabo explains that the participating city behind Nauplion was Argos, whereas the Spartans ‘contributed’ (συνετέλουν) on behalf of Prasiai.77

72 75

76 77

73 74 Alexandridou 2013. Strabo 8.6.14. BNJ 70 F 150. See commentary on BNJ 70 F 150; cf. Paus. 2.33.2; Callim. F 593 Pfeiffer; schol. Aesch. Eum. 27. On Delos, see also the contribution by Julietta Steinhauer to this volume, Chapter 10. Strabo 8.6.14. The scholarship on the alleged amphictyony is formidable; see, among others, Busolt and Swoboda 1926: 1280–81; Kelly 1966; Tausend 1992: 12–19; Mylonopoulos 2003: 427–31; Constantakopoulou 2007: 29–37; Funke 2013: 460–62.

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It is unclear whether Strabo’s information on the amphictyony also derived from Ephoros.78 If so, it is intriguing to note that Ephoros would have written about the Kalaureian amphictyony roughly at a time when quarrels over the amphictyony of Delphi had thrown the Greek world into the turmoil of the Third Sacred War (356–346 BCE). While the theme of changing religious realms and staking claims that challenged Delphi’s authority does not raise suspicions as such, its combination with the account of conflict-laden affairs revolving around the Delphic amphictyony and the rise of Macedon evidently does. In the third piece of information provided by Strabo in his survey of Kalaureia, such troubles are foregrounded. Strabo reports that the sanctuary was surrounded by an aura of inviolability. Its function as an asylum was so renowned, and so much respected, that a Macedonian detachment, although in possession of the temple at the time, did not dare to extract from the sanctuary the famous Athenian politician Demosthenes, who had sought refuge there. Intimidated by Poseidon’s force, the Macedonians let Demosthenes commit suicide in the sanctuary rather than violating the sacred asylia.79 If this story also came from Ephoros, then it is clear that the entire section in Strabo was rooted in fourth-century discourses. Circumstances in the fourth century (or early Hellenistic period?) seem to have impacted the member-list of the league also. In the local arena, the absence of Troizen raises questions, as does that of Corinth and Megara further up the coast; both are missing. Maybe the list of seven was incomplete. Prasiai and Nauplion have been interpreted as clues to the amphictyony’s foundation date. Since both were conquered at some time in the Archaic period – the former by Sparta around the mid-sixth century, the latter in the second half of the seventh century by Argos – their independent status is sometimes understood as a terminus ante quem; hence, the league ought to have been established in the first half of the seventh century, if not earlier.80 It is of course treacherous to assert how the political status of Late Geometric communities might be defined. For most of the Archaic period, Prasiai and Nauplion were prominent harbour towns; Ps-Skylax 46 and 49 denotes each as ‘polis and harbour’. From the outer rim of the Saronic, from Hydra and Spetses, they were the

78

79 80

The editor of BNJ 70 (V. Parker) did not include this part of Strabo’s text into F 150; see the discussion there. Strabo 8.6.14; Plut. Dem. 29. On the sanctuary’s role as asylum, see note 90. Nauplion: Theopompos BNJ 115 F 383; Paus. 4.24.4; 4.35.2; Piérart 2004. Prasiai: Hdt. 1.82; Shipley 2004.

Refitting the Local Horizon of Ancient Greek Religion

obvious landing points on the eastern Peloponnese and in the Bay of Argos. Later writers inevitably associated Nauplion and Prasiai with Argos and Sparta, yet their inclusion first and foremost followed the logic of naval connectivity. In the net of (trans-)Saronic seafaring, both were known quantities. Minyan (that is, Boiotian) Orchomenos, on the other hand, is erratic. Was Orchomenos included instead of the more obvious choice Thebes because the latter had been, for most of the fourth century, a notoriously unyielding competitor of Athens in Central Greece?81 Strabo’s account on the amphictyony is, in sum, puzzling. Note that he himself found it difficult to make sense of it; hence his τις (‘some’). All the while, we ought to remind ourselves that Strabo is the only literary source far and wide who makes mention of an amphictyony on Kalaureia. In a Hellenistic inscription mentioned above that was retrieved from the peribolos wall of the temple and that identifies the island as sacred to Poseidon, reference is made to a board of sacred officials, hiaromnamones, who represented an amphictyony.82 The date established by the excavators, the third or early second centuries BCE, places the document at an unknown moment in a crowded timeline. Due to its central location in Greek affairs, universal power politics imprinted heavily onto the Saronic. For much of the Classical period, the region had virtually evolved into a dooryard to the Piraeus, although the Peloponnesian coast, for a few decades from 445 BCE, was subject to Sparta.83 After the Lamian War, the Saronic was in Antigonid possession. Soon enough, in the Chremonidean War (267–261 BCE), Macedonian supremacy was rivalled by the Ptolemies who established a lasting foothold on Methana; for roughly a century, the settlement there bore the name Arsinoe.84 By the mid-third century, the Achaian League temporarily annexed the Peloponnesian shores of the Saronic. In 196, Titus Quinctius Flamininus made his famous freedom declaration of Hellas up the Peloponnesian coast in another precinct of Poseidon, that of Isthmia; the announcement was accompanied by Roman alliances with several cities in the region, including Troizen.85 In the middle of these changes in the world writ-large, reference to continuity in place must have been an obvious choice. The Hellenistic 81

82 84 85

Other explanations relate the reference to the notorious Minyans in the Peloponnese or to Arkadian Orchomenos. Ephoros BNJ 70 F 152 (if Strabo’s source) makes it clear, however, that he had Boiotian Orchomenos in mind. 83 IG IV 842, lines 3–4 and 7–9. Thuc. 1.115.1. Robertson 1982; Wallensten and Pakkanen 2009. Achaian League: IG IV2 1, 70; Paus. 2.8.5; Rome: see IG IV 791.

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amphictyony will have found it apt and convenient to promote a long history. Rather than the revival of an organisation from the Geometric and Archaic times, it is not unlikely that the league accentuated its role in the present by retroprojecting its prestige into a distant past. From the days of Antigonid intervention, the settlement of Kalaureia for the first time proclaimed for itself the status of a polis with an associated body of citizens, the πόλις τῶν Καλαυρεατᾶν. Articulated in conjunction with the amphictyony, the claim can be seen as a thrust towards transregional recognition.86 Usage of the very label amphiktyonia, with its strong sense of primordial neighbourhood ties, would have supplemented such claims: in the Hellenistic Age, the term clearly had an Archaising ring, amplified by overtones of Delphi as the most renowned example. This is not to deny the obvious, that the claim for long-lasting ties in the Saronic was reflective of and supported by a high volume of travel across the region. Among the few epigraphic pieces that attest to the πόλις τῶν Καλαυρεατᾶν is, tellingly, a collective grant of ateleia (immunity or exemption from duties) to the island of Siphnos, gateway through the open perimeter of the Saronic into the Aegean.87 It is perfectly conceivable that the Hellenistic League, building off the notion of general connectedness, resorted to the theme of timehonoured inviolability. Effectively, this would have bolstered its role and reputation as asylum. And there might have been feeble initiatives at some point to establish a kind of religious assemblage of various stakeholders across the Saronic. Other than highlighting the idea of interactions and networks condensing in the Sanctuary of Poseidon at Kalaureia, however, the available evidence adds little to substantiate the existence of an Archaic amphictyony. The local horizon provides safer ground. The earliest source to comment on local affairs is Hekataios of Miletos who mentions Kalaureia in one breath with Troizen, observing the physical proximity of the two: the distance between the Troizenian agora and the Sanctuary of Poseidon is 12 km as the crow flies.88 In the referencing authority, Harpokration’s Lexicon of Ten Attic Orators, it is stated that Kalaureia was formerly named

86

87 88

IG IV 839 (= Syll.3 359; late fourth century); IG IV 841 and 848 (second century). See Robertson 1982: 11. IG IV 839 = Syll.3 359. BNJ 1 F 125. Note the silence of Homer and the Homeric Hymns on Kalaureia. By means of contrast, the Sanctuary of Poseidon at Onchestos and its Archaic amphictyony, which often serve as a point of comparison, did not escape the Homeric tradition: Hom. Il. 2.506; Hom. Hymn Apo. 230–38; Hom. Hymn Herm. 87–88, 186–90; and, presumably, Hom. Hymn Pos., where nearby Mount Helikon is mentioned (3). See also Alkaios F425 Campbell (from Strabo).

Refitting the Local Horizon of Ancient Greek Religion

Eirene (‘Peace’), as the early Hellenistic historian Antikleides of Athens said. The same name was recorded in [Aristotle’s] Constitution of the Troizenians. [Aristotle’s] fragment continues noticing that, prior to Eirene, the island was called Anthedonia, after the son of Poseidon and mythical king of Troizen, Anthas.89 The sequence of placenames is surely indicative of evolving local discourses. While ‘Eirene’ has been found, with good reason, to be indicative of the sanctuary’s recognition as asylum, inclusion into the legend of Anthas and the mythical pedigree of the clan of the Antheadai drew Kalaureia firmly into the orbit of Troizen.90 By the mid-sixth century, the domain of Troizen reached as far as the island of Hydra on the southern rim of the Saronic.91 Given Kalaureia’s location, on the doorstep of Troizen’s harbour Pogon, it is most likely that the island was also a possession of Troizen. The late-fifth-century sculptor Pison was described by Pausanias as ‘from Kalaureia of the Troizenians’.92 In Archaic, and for most of the Classical, times, then, Kalaureia’s path was intertwined with that of the city of Troizen. The size of the settlement on Kalaureia corroborates the picture. The ancient town – if a town indeed – was located to the south of the temenos. Archaeological evidence from that sector is almost entirely absent as the area has not yet been fully scrutinised; only toward the rim of the sacred precinct have some architectural remains been unearthed.93 It is clear enough, however, that the physical environment does not leave room for extensive habitation. Maybe the town extended further downslope through terracing of the ground, although there is no firm evidence for this yet. For later periods, a population figure of up to 350 has been suggested, not more for Archaic and Classical times.94 The humble settlement stands in curious contrast to the monumentality of the temple. When the public buildings of the sacred precinct are taken into account, situated between the temple and

89

90

91 93

94

Antikleides FGrH 140 F 9 (not in BNJ); [Aristotle] F 596 and 597 Rose3, from Plut. Mor. 295e–f = Quaest. Graec. 19; also, Steph. Byz. s.v. Kalaureia. Asylum: e.g. Sinn 1993; Schumacher 1993. Antheadai: Toepffer, RE I.2 (1894) cols. 2357–58, s.v. Anthas; Jameson 2004. 92 Hdt. 3.59.1. Paus. 10.9.8. Swedish excavations in the area begun in 2018, clustering around a complex labelled Area L. The findings have not yet been published. For now, see Welter 1941: 50–51, who summarises what was established by earlier excavators. Note that the location of the ancient agora has since been reconsidered. It is now found to lie south and south-east of complexes E, D, and F (Penttinen et al. 2009: 90); Wide and Kjellberg 1896 had put it north towards the temple. The new location allows for identification of building complexes G and I as domestic structures, which also aligns with the small finds. Pharaklas 1972: 43.

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suggested settlement area, the disproportion becomes even more flashy. The sector comprises several stoas as well as a building that served as the possible propylon to the temenos. Generally associated with a major phase of building activity in the later fourth century, the Swedish excavations have now established that some of the structures have a late Archaic pedigree. The building labelled Stoa D and the possible propylon (‘E’) date from the later sixth century. Their function is not always clear; indeed, the recent excavators have been more hesitant with assigning purpose to individual structures than their predecessors. At least in the case of Stoa D, the Swedish team determined that ‘dining or feasting was always the main activity in the area’.95 Note that amidst the impressive architectural record, no religious buildings of other deities have been discovered on the plateau yet. In three Hellenistic inscriptions from the area, Zeus Soter and Aphrodite (no epithet) are mentioned, yet none of them seems to have had a separate sanctuary. The ritual threads of both lead across the straits to Troizen as a likely anchor point of worship.96 In other words, Kalaureia was geared towards the cult of Poseidon. Who was behind the extensive Archaic building programme and its ongoing advancement in the early Hellenistic period, and who was the ritual community that made use of all this? It is impossible to answer these questions with certainty, but it appears arduous to see anybody else than the people of Troizen as the true agents behind cult on the island. The coinages from Kalaureia endorse the idea of intertwinement. To date, excavations have brought to light only a small number of bronze emissions. What unites these finds is that they are terribly worn and corroded by the soils: poor preservation conditions, in conjunction with the low sample number, pose significant challenges to their interpretation (during the 2003 campaigns, the discovery of seven pieces marked the high point). The legible coins have been dated to the final decades of the fourth century and the first half of the third. Judging from the archaeological find context, they were in circulation until around the mid-second century; hence, they overlapped with the epigraphic record for the Hellenistic amphictyony and the πόλις τῶν Καλαυρεατᾶν. Iconographies on the front show the bearded head of Poseidon wearing a laurel wreath; on the reverse,

95 96

Wells et al. 2005: 182. Artemis: IG IV 844; cf. Paus. 2.32.3, 6, and 7. Zeus Soter: IG IV 840–41; cf. Paus. 2.31.10, who sees the Soteric guise of Zeus intertwined with the Antheadai (note 90). Welter 1941: 51 had placed the veneration of Zeus Soter onto the agora of Kalaureia, but note that the overall location of the agora has shifted (note 93).

Refitting the Local Horizon of Ancient Greek Religion

a trident is typically depicted (a sea monster on rare instances). The accompanying legends read ΚΑΛ and, more frequently, ΤΡΟ and ΚΑΛ side by side.97 Maybe the two variants were struck by different mints and, hence, constituted separate series. Iconographically they are, however, not only similar to each other, but they also closely resemble Troizenian monies (after 322 BCE) – without the added legend ΚΑΛ, they would easily identify as polis emissions of Troizen.98 The desire for distinction, while at the same time fully absorbing the Troizenian style, has been explained as testimony to an alliance or sympolity between both communities.99 It appears haphazard to decide between these options; evidence from a few coins alone is rather weak to allow for either conclusion. Something else is in any case more interesting. We already noted how the promotion of Kalaureia’s polis status, while generally supporting the community’s visibility, supplemented the sanctuary’s role as seat of the Hellenistic amphictyony. A minimalist interpretation of the double-legend emissions suggests they served the twofold purpose of bolstering Kalaureia’s recognition and of showcasing, with an alert sense to the situation on the ground, the continued backhaul of the Sanctuary of Poseidon to the city of Troizen. The final clue for the intimate connection comes out of Troizen itself. Its ‘Hauptgott’ was Poseidon, whom Pausanias describes as recipient of offerings under the epithet of Basileus.100 Pausanias mentions no premier sanctuary of Poseidon in the city. The only precinct that he encountered was that of Poseidon Phytalmios, ‘the Nurturer’, whose sanctuary was placed outside the city. The epithet identifies Poseidon as saviour of vegetation from salt water (φυτάλμιος, ‘nourishing’, from ‘plant’ and ‘sea water’, φυτάς/ἁλμή). Pausanias explains that this quality was a direct reflection of local circumstances: saltwater penetrations of the Troizenian chōra, notoriously in the lower grounds around Lake Psifi, posed an eminent threat to the agrarian produce; hence the ritual appeasement of the god. Worship of Poseidon Phytalmios implied a conspicuous blending of land and sea, both integral parts of the countryside, one seamlessly

97

98

99 100

Wells et al. 2006–07: 124–27; Traeger 2021; cf. BCD Peloponnesos #1339; SNG Copenhagen (Argolis) #160 and 161; BMC Peloponnesus #15 (pl. XXXI.1). Note that the head of Poseidon appears on Troizenian emissions only from the later fourth century, that is, simultaneously with the Kalaureian coinage. Both series are so similar that BCD Peloponnesos #1339.7–9 folds them together. Welter 1941: 66; Wells et al. 2006–07: 125. Mylonopoulos 2003: 88; Paus. 2.30.6; see also Burkert 1977/1985: 67. Plut. Thes. 6.1 calls Poseidon πολιοῦχος, which spells out protective powers over Troizen rather than being an epithet as such.

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Figure 2.4 The local horizon of Troizen: terrestrial and marine contiguity.

merging into the other, and it married them into an eloquent epithet.101 The short Homeric Hymn to Poseidon (seven lines) attests to the god’s dual potency over land and sea, stating that a ‘two-fold domain … was allotted to you, Earth Shaker, to be a tamer of horses and a saviour of ships’.102 We noted earlier that there might be a Mycenaean pedigree to this. Be that as it may, with the Troizenian encoding, the character-traits of earth shaker and tamer of horses were supplemented with more agrarian qualities, adding tutelary and cultivating abilities to the repertoire. It has been suggested that Poseidon was venerated in Troizen also as ‘Leader of the Country’ (ἀρχηγέτης τῆς χώρας). If correct, this explicates Poseidon’s powers over the land even further.103 Phytalmios provides a curious case of correspondence between local religion and universal cult practice. Plutarch observed that Poseidon the 101

102 103

See Mylonopoulos 2003: 373–90 (on Phytalmios, 383–84); Robertson 1984: 14. For a nuanced reading of the epithet, see Szidat 2001: 106–07 (connection with Demeter and the nymphs). Hom. Hymn Pos. 4–5. See Robertson 1982: 10, from line 9 of the Themistokles Decree: [… 21 …] τοῦ ἀρχηγέτου τῆς χώρας.

Refitting the Local Horizon of Ancient Greek Religion

Nurturer was venerated by many Greeks, although we ought to note that the few attested cases (from the Hellenistic period) cluster in the Saronic.104 Some 15 km to the north of Troizen, a shrine of Phytalmios is known through an inscription on unworked volcanic stone at the ancient site of Oga on Methana. On the outer rim of the Saronic, a sanctuary of Phytalmios has been reported in Ios, the next island past Siphnos.105 Apparently Phytalmios was also venerated on Rhodes; it is probably just a geographic coincidence that the Rhodian case marked a point on a ritual corridor that cut straight through the Aegean.106 The aition related by Pausanias suggests in any case that the Troizenian example was the trigger for the epithet, permeating worship of Poseidon’s protective powers of the plants elsewhere.107 If indeed the case, the incident captures the interrelation between the local environment and ritual response to the challenge it presented, and further, how both stamped the universal frame of Greek religion. It is tempting, then, on more general grounds, to see Kalaureia’s religious networks as instrumental to the spread of Poseidon’s agricultural qualities, although there is no hardwired evidence to substantiate this further. The exact location of Poseidon Phytalmios’ sanctuary in Troizen is unknown. Recent survey work in the countryside (in 2012) has provided no new insight. Among the possible locations is a terrace site below the temple of Demeter Thesmophoros to the east of the ancient settlement or an indeterminate point along the main road from the city to the harbour area of Pogon.108 The former location, if correct, allowed for a panoramic view over the countryside as far as Lake Psifi and the east coast of Methana toward Oga, while the latter directed the ritual eye to Sphairia and Kalaureia. Pausanias asserts that Sphairia, in his times, was part of the Troizenian cultscape. We just noted how reference to Zeus Soter and Aphrodite on Kalaureia related back to Troizen. Before marriage, the young girls of Troizen dedicated their girdles to Athena Apatouria on

104 105

106 107

108

Plut. Quaest. conv. 5.3.1 = Mor. 675F. Methana: SEG 47, 330 (fourth to second century); Mee and Forbes 1997: 270; Yannopoulou 2017: 148–49. Ios: IG XII.5 13 (late fourth century, Zeus or Poseidon?); Reger 2004: 743. In the Saronic, see also IG II2 5051 (Athens, Imperial period) and Plut. Quaest. Conv. 8.8.4 = Mor. 730D (Megara?). Lindos, LSCG 140 (third century); Kameiros, Clara Rhodos 6/7: 386 (third to second century). See Yannopoulou 2017, who charts the rise of Poseidon on Kalaureia and Methana as processes relating to and emanating from Troizen. The site of Oga, located 67m asl and hardly susceptive to saltwater penetrations, was an unlikely independent feeder of ‘phytalmic’ aetiologies. Paus. 2.32.8; see Stupperich, Stupperich and Hill 2019: 35; Yannopoulou 2017: 150–51.

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Sphairia.109 Possibly the ritual was aetiologically related to the interesting fact reported in the same passage that the cult at Kalaureia was serviced by a maiden priestess; however, the details remain unknown.110 What can be drawn from these observations is that the natural environment of the Troizenian countryside, the harbour and bay area, as well as Sphairia and Kalaureia constituted one ritual space, contiguous between land and sea, one intersecting with the other. In their aversion rituals, and in the religious conduct overall, the people of Troizen will have paid reverence to this spatial quality of the local, according to traditions and prescriptions that were themselves subject to the local ways, to nomos.111 The Sanctuary of Poseidon on Kalaureia was the most liminal point on the local horizon, a ritual outpost connected via Pogon and Sphairia. Among other ritual expressions, the Troizenians will have led centrifugal processions to the temenos on certain festival days. Judging from the immanent qualities of prayer outlined earlier, the evocation of Poseidon’s tutelary powers, along the way and on site in Kalaureia, will have further instilled the ritual community with a sense of local contiguity. More sprawling festivals, possibly in the month sacred to Poseidon, ought to have entailed lavish dining and feasting in the well-equipped halls on site.112 In sum, the marine–terrestrial world of Troizen and Kalaureia was both a canvas and an inspiration to religious practices that were deeply grounded in the local horizon.

Conclusion As a fruitful concept in the study of ancient Greek religion, the local embodies relational scales of agency and meaning. The local is always in conversation with translocal realms of action. In a region as densely integrated and tightly structured as the Saronic, this observation is further complicated by the fact that local and regional spheres often blend into one another, one intimately embracing the other. Moreover, both strands were subject to the great tidal waves of power politics. All the while, the notion of omnipresent entanglement does not render local approximations elusive 109 111

112

110 Paus. 2.33.1–2. See Mylonopoulos 2003: 88. See the collection of explicitly attested sites and locations in the countryside by Welter 1941: 63–64, that embodied this particular quality of the local. The Geraistios: Ath. 14.639c, who also speaks of a festival that went on for several days in honour of an unknown deity – likely Poseidon, according to Mylonopoulos 2003: 90.

Refitting the Local Horizon of Ancient Greek Religion

either. Local approaches subscribe to a certain perspective. But the writing of local history and the quest for the governing force of the local are two different exercises, in quality and in scope. The latter seeks to break into discourse environments that are not only confined in place but relate to it; that prioritise place, real and symbolic, as a source of inspiration and meaning; and, in turn, that receive orientation from the local horizon in changing circumstances that occur in the world. In the study of ancient Greek religion, the epichoric lens captures constellations of unwavering coexistence between humans and the divine, and of a particular type of worship that was inspired by and geared toward place. On Kalaureia, the epichoric eye lends new perspectives both on the Sanctuary of Poseidon and its role in tight-meshed networks of religious communications. Typically considered the seat of an enigmatic amphictyony that was established somewhere in the Archaic Age, emblematic of the integrated nature of Greek religion, the quest for the local dimension of meaning-making reveals how ritual action in the Sanctuary of Poseidon was subject to the specificity of local place. In this sense, the site’s trajectory, while energised by regional networks in the Saronic and across the Peloponnese, was driven by highly localised processes. Poseidon, in his Kalaureian guise, wielded special force over the contiguous marine– terrestrial world of Troizen and surroundings. The god embodied ambiguous qualities, as it were, as tamer of land and sea; the Troizenian variant brought a nurturing quality to this that was derived from and inspired by the local backdrop. A hub of communication from the early Archaic Age, Kalaureia’s religious networks facilitated swift dissemination of this quality in the Saronic and across the Aegean. Kalaureia’s role can thus be seen as that of a religious broker: occupying a supreme location, it attracted recognition and cultural input from away, and it injected, in turn, its own epichoric ways into the conduct of Greek religion, fusing it with local idiosyncrasy and meaning.

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(ed.) (2002) Globalization. London. Beck, H. (2020) Localism and the Ancient Greek City-State. Chicago, Ill. (forthcoming a) ‘Thebes’, in P. Cartledge and P. Christesen (eds.) The Oxford History of the Archaic Greek World. Oxford. (forthcoming b) ‘Making Landscapes, Building Communities. A Journey along the Kopais Corridor in Boiotia’, Klio 105. Berman, D. W. (2015) Myth, Literature, and the Creation of the Topography of Thebes. Cambridge. Bintliff, J. L. (2006) ‘City–Country Relationships in the “Normal Polis”’, in R. M. Rosen and I. Sluiter (eds.) City, Countryside, and the Spatial Organization of Value in Classical Antiquity. Leiden, 13–32. Bonnet, C. (ed.) (2021) Noms de dieux. Portraits de divinités antiques. Paris. Braudel, F. (1949/1979) La Méditerranée et le monde méditeranéen à l’epoque de Philippe II. Paris. Bremmer, J. (2019) ‘Rivers and River Gods in Ancient Greek Religion and Culture’, in T. Scheer (ed.) Natur – Mythos – Religion im antiken Griechenland. Stuttgart, 89–112. Burkert, W. (1977/1985) Greek Religion. Archaic and Classical. Oxford. Busolt, G. and H. Swoboda. (1926) Griechische Staatskunde, volume 2, third ed. Munich. Carbon, J.-M. and J. Clackson. (2016) ‘Arms and the Boy: On the New Festival Calendar from Arkadia’, Kernos 29, 119–58. Christian, W. A. (1981) Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain. Princeton, N.J. Concannon, C. and L. A. Mazurek (eds.) (2016) Across the Corrupting Sea. PostBraudelian Approaches to the Ancient Eastern Mediterranean. London. Constantakopoulou, C. (2007) The Dance of the Islands. Insularity, Networks, the Athenian Empire, and the Aegean World. Oxford. Crumley, C. L., T. Lennartsson and A. Westin (eds.) (2017) Issues and Concepts in Historical Ecology. The Past and Future of Landscapes and Regions. Cambridge. Ehrhardt, N. (1993) ‘Zwei archaische Statuen mit Nymphen-Weihungen aus Milet’, Epigraphica Anatolica 21, 3–8. Eidinow, E. (2015) ‘Ancient Greek Religion. Embedded … and Embodied’, in C. Taylor and K. Vlassopoulos (eds.) Communities and Networks in Ancient Greece. Cambridge, 54–79. Étienne, R. and D. Knoepfler (1976) Hyettos de Béotie et la chronologie des archontes fédéraux entre 250 et 171 avant J.-C. Paris. Figl, J. (1993) Die Mitte der Religionen. Idee und Praxis universalreligiöser Bewegungen. Darmstadt. Figueira, T. J. (2004) ‘The Saronic Gulf’, in M. H. Hansen and T. H. Nielsen (ed.) An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis. Oxford, 620–23. Fontenrose, J. (1988) Didyma: Apollo’s Oracle, Cult, and Companions. Berkeley, Calif.

Refitting the Local Horizon of Ancient Greek Religion Funke, P. (2013) ‘Greek Amphiktyonies. An Experiment in Transregional Governance’, in H. Beck (ed.) Companion to Ancient Greek Government. Malden, Mass., 449–65. Furley, W. D. (2010) ‘Prayers and Hymns’, in D. Ogden (ed.) Companion to Greek Religion. Malden, Mass., 117–31. Ganter, A. (2021) ‘Money, Cults and Arms: Questioning Regional Cooperation in Early Arcadia’, in C. Grandjean (ed.), The Koina of Southern Greece. Historical and Numismatic Studies in Ancient Greek Federalism. Bordeaux, 27–48. Gebhard, E. R. (1993) ‘The Evolution of a Pan-Hellenic Sanctuary: From Archaeology towards History at Isthmia’, in N. Marinatos and R. Hägg (eds.) Greek Sanctuaries. New Approaches. New York, N.Y., 154–77. (2011) ‘Poseidon on the Isthmus: Between Macedon and Rome, 198 to 196 BCE’, in M. Haake and M. Jung (eds.) Griechische Heiligtümer als Erinnerungsorte. Vin der Archaik bis in den Hellenismus. Stuttgart, 45–68. Goette, H. R. (2000) Landeskundliche Studien in Südost-Attika. Rahden. Grundmann, C. H. et al. (2011) ‘Inculturation’, in Religion Past and Present, s.v., consulted online on 26 September 2022 at http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/18775888_rpp_COM_10423. Harrison, J. E. (1927) Themis. A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, second ed. Cambridge. Harvey, D. (1979/2006) ‘Space as a Keyword’, in N. Castree and D. Gregory (eds.) David Harvey. A Critical Reader. Malden, Mass., 270–94. Herda, A. (2006) Der Apollon-Delphinios-Kult in Milet und die Neujahrsprozession nach Didyma. Ein neuer Kommentar der sog. Molopoi-Satzung. Mainz. Jameson, M. H. (2004) ‘Troizen and Halikarnassos in the Hellenistic Era’, in S. Isager and P. Pedersen (eds.) The Salmakis Inscription and Hellenistic Halikarnassos. Odense and Portland, Ore., 93–109. Kelly, T. (1966) ‘The Calaurian Amphictiony’, American Journal of Archaeology 70, 113–21. Kerschner, M. (ed.) (2020) Der Kult der Meter/Kybele in Westanatolien und in der Ägäis. Vienna. Kühr, A. (2006) Als Kadmos nach Boiotien kam. Polis und Ethnos im Spiegel thebanischer Gründungsmythen. Stuttgart. Kurke, L. (2012) ‘The Value of Chorality in Ancient Greece’, in J. K. Papadopoulos and G. Urton (eds.) The Construction of Value in the Ancient World. Los Angeles, Calif., 218–35. Larson, J. (2001) Greek Nymphs. Myth, Cult, Lore. Oxford. (2019) ‘Nature Gods, Nymphs, and the Cognitive Science of Religion’, in T. Scheer (ed.) Natur – Mythos – Religion im antiken Griechenland. Stuttgart, 71–88. Lefebvre, H. (1974/1991) The Production of Space, transl. D. Nicholson-Smith. Malden, Mass.

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McHugh, M. (2017) The Ancient Greek Farmstead. Oxford. Mee, C. and H. Forbes (eds.) (1997) A Rough and Rocky Place. The Landscape and Settlement History of the Methana Peninsula, Greece. Liverpool. Mohr, M. (2013) Die Heilige Straße – ein ‘Weg der Mitte’? Soziale Gruppenbildung im Spannungsfeld der archaischen Polis. Rahden. Morris, I. (2005) ‘Mediterraneanization’, in I. Malkin (ed.) Mediterranean Paradigms and Classical Antiquity. London, 30–55. Mourtzas, N. D. and E. Kolaiti (2013) ‘Historical Coastal Evolution of the Ancient Harbour of Aegina in Relation to the Upper Holocene Relative Sea Level Changes in the Saronic Gulf, Greece’, Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 392, 411–25. Mylona, D. (2015) ‘From Fish Bones to Fishermen: Views from the Sanctuary of Poseidon at Kalaureia’, in D. C. Haggis and C. M. Antonaccio (eds.) Classical Archaeology in Context. Theory and Practice in Excavation in the Greek World. Berlin and Boston, Mass., 385–418. Mylonopoulos, J. (2003) Heiligtümer und Kulte des Poseidon auf der Peloponnes. Liège. (2006) ‘Von Helike nach Tainaron und von Kalaureia nach Samikon: Amphiktyonische Heiligtümer des Poseidon auf der Peloponnes’, in K. Freitag, P. Funke and M. Haake (eds.) Kult – Politik – Ethnos. Überregionale Heiligtümer im Spannungsfeld von Kult und Politik. Stuttgart, 121–56. Ogden, D. (ed.) (2007) A Companion to Greek Religion. Malden, Mass. Pakkanen, J. (2009) ‘A Tale of Three Drums: An Unfinished Archaic Votive Column in the Sanctuary of Poseidon at Kalaureia’, Opuscula. Annual of the Swedish Institutes at Athens and Rome 2, 167–79. Papalexandrou, N. (2008) ‘Boiotian Tripods: The Tenacity of a Panhellenic Symbol in a Regional Context’, Hesperia 77, 251–82. Papazarkadas, N. (2014) ‘Two New Epigrams from Thebes’, in N. Papazarkadas (ed.) The Epigraphy and History of Boeotia. New Finds, New Prospects. Leiden, 223–51. Parker, R. (1986) ‘Greek Religion’, in J. Boardman, J. Griffin and O. Murray (eds.) The Oxford History of the Classical World. Oxford, 254–74. (1996) Athenian Religion. A History. Oxford. Penttinen, A. et al. (2009) ‘Report on the Excavations in the Years 2007 and 2008 Southeast of the Temple of Poseidon at Kalaureia’, Opuscula. Annual of the Swedish Institutes at Athens and Rome 2, 89–141. Pharaklas, N. (1972) Τροιζηνία, Καλαύρεια, Μέθανα. Athens. Piérart, M. (2004) ‘Argos’, in M. H. Hansen and T. H. Nielsen (eds.) An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis. Oxford, 599–619. Pirenne-Delforge, V. (1994) L’Aphrodite grecque. Contributions à l’étude de ses cultes et de sa personnalité dans le panthéon archaïque et classique. Athens and Liège.

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Polignac, F. de (1984/1995) Cults, Territory, and the Origins of the Greek City-State. Chicago, Ill. Polinskaya, I. (2013) A Local History of Greek Polytheism. Gods, People and the Land of Aigina, 800–400 BCE. Leiden. Price, S. (1999) Religions of the Ancient Greeks. Cambridge. Reger, G. (2004) ‘The Aegean’, in M. H. Hansen and T. H. Nielsen (eds.) An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis. Oxford, 732–93. Robertson, N. (1982) ‘The Decree of Themistocles in its Contemporary Setting’, Phoenix 36, 1–44. (1984) ‘Poseidon’s Festival at the Winter Solstice’, Classical Quarterly 34, 1–16. Schachter, A. (1981–94) Cults of Boeotia, 4 volumes. London. (2000/2016) ‘The Daphnephoria of Thebes’, in A. Schachter (ed.) Boiotia in Antiquity. Selected Papers. Cambridge, 255–78. Schumacher, R. W. M. (1993) ‘Three Related Sanctuaries of Poseidon: Geraistos, Kalaureia, and Tainaron’, in N. Marinatos and R. Hägg (eds.) Greek Sanctuaries. New Approaches. New York, N.Y., 62–87. Shelmerdine, C. W. (2016) ‘Poseidon, Pa-ki-ja-na, and Horse-Taming Nestor’, in E. Alram-Stern, F. Blakolmer and J. Weilhartner (eds.) Metaphysis. Ritual, Myth, and Symbolism in the Aegean Bronze Age. Austin, Tex., 275–83. Shipley, G. (2004) ‘Messenia’, in M. H. Hansen and T. H. Nielsen (eds.) An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis. Oxford, 547–68. Sinn, U. (1993) ‘Greek Sanctuaries as Places of Refuge’, in N. Marinatos and R. Hägg (eds.) Greek Sanctuaries. New Approaches. New York, N.Y., 88–109. Stupperich, R., C. Stupperich and D. Hill (2019) ‘Preliminary Report on an Architectural Survey Conducted in Troezen, Peloponnesus’, Thetis 24, 21–42. Szidat, S. (2001) Poseidon der Erderschütterer. Munich. Tartaron, T. (2013) Maritime Networks in the Mycenaean World. Cambridge. Tausend, K. (1992) Amphiktyonie und Symmachie. Formen zwischenstaatlicher Beziehungen im archaischen Griechenland. Stuttgart. (2006) Verkehrswege der Argolis. Rekonstruktion und historische Bedeutung. Stuttgart. Theodoropoulou, T. (2009) ‘Appendix: The Sea-Shells from the Excavations in Area H in the Sanctuary of Poseidon at Kalaureia in 2007 and 2008’, Opuscula. Annual of the Swedish Institutes at Athens and Rome 2, 136–41. (2013) ‘The Sea in the Temple? Shells, Fish and Corals from the Sanctuary of the Ancient Town of Kythnos and Other Marine Stories of Cult’, in G. Ekroth and J. Wallensten (eds.) Bones, Behaviour and Belief. The Zooarchaeological Evidence as a Source for Ritual Practice in Ancient Greece and Beyond. Stockholm, 197–222. Theodoropoulou-Polychroniadis, Z. (2015) Sounion Revisited. The Sanctuaries of Poseidon and Athena at Sounion in Attica. Oxford.

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  Traeger, B. (2021) ‘Kalaureia. Eine nahezu unbekannte Münzstätte im Saronischen Golf’, Numismatisches Nachrichtenblatt 70, 85–89. Versnel, H. S. (1981) ‘Religious Mentality in Ancient Prayer’, in H. S. Versnel (ed.) Faith, Hope, and Worship. Leiden, 1–64. Vian, F. (1963) Les origines de Thèbes. Cadmos et les Spartes. Paris. Wallensten, J. and J. Pakkanen (2009) ‘A New Inscribed Statue Base from the Sanctuary of Poseidon at Kalaureia’, Opuscula. Annual of the Swedish Institutes at Athens and Rome 2, 155–65. Wells, B. et al. (2005) ‘The Kalaureia Excavation Project: The 2003 Season’, Opuscula Atheniensia. Annual of the Swedish Institutes at Athens 30, 127–215. (2006–07) ‘The Kalaureia Excavation Project: The 2004 and 2005 Seasons’, Opuscula Atheniensia. Annual of the Swedish Institutes at Athens 31–32, 31–129. Welter, G. (1941) Troizen und Kalauria. Berlin. Wide, S. and L. Kjellberg (1896) ‘Ausgrabungen auf Kalaureia’, Athenische Mitteilungen 20, 267–326. Wiemer, H.-U. (ed.) (2019) Studien zum Verhältnis von Kult und Raum in alten Kulturen. Stuttgart. Yannopoulou, E. K. (2017) ‘The Beginning and the Development of Poseidon’s Cult in Troezenia’, in D. Katsonopoulou (ed.) Ancient Helike and Aigialeia. Poseidon. God of Earthquakes and Waters. Cult and Sanctuaries. Athens, 143–63.

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Mycenaean Greek Worship in Minoan Territory  

References in the Linear B record to deities of the later pantheon, for instance Poseidon, Zeus, and Hera, among others, vividly attests to the Mycenaean pedigree of Greek religion. This chapter suggests that the resonance with local place, so foundational a characteristic of Hellenic belief in later times, also derived from Mycenaean origins. Susan Lupack decodes the complicated helix of Minoan and Mycenaean religion; intertwinement between them was so intense that the first excavators of Knossos on Crete had conceived of them as one and the same religious system. Mycenaean religion evolved through appropriations from the Minoans. Supplementing mainland Greek characteristics in the conduct of religion, for instance, the focalisation on the role of the wanax, the Mycenaeans adopted from Crete what fit comfortably within their belief. The spectacular find of artefacts retrieved from the tomb of the Griffin Warrior in Pylos showcases the creative Minoan–Mycenaean mix. At around the same time, from ca. 1450 BCE, Lupack identifies an intriguing back ripple effect. Tracing the movement of Mycenaean peoples to Crete, the linguistic examination of the famous Room of the Chariot Tablets from Knossos demonstrates how the first wave of arrivals predominantly practised the religion they had brought with them from their mainland homes. A second assemblage from Knossos from only ca. sixty years later reveals a staggering development. It shows that the Mycenaeans now not only made an effort to worship Minoan deities, but also lent a new guise to their gods and goddesses, relating them to, and embedding them in, the land of the Minoans. From its very origins, Greek religion took on its recognisable form through interaction with its specific locale – it developed and differentiated itself from other Indo-European religions within the landscapes of mainland Greece, perhaps in the Early Helladic III period (ca. 2200 BCE), or perhaps even as far back as the beginning of the Bronze Age (ca. 3000 BCE). Each time a people moves to inhabit a new space, they invest their physical and emotional energies in that land as they seek out its resources, build their shelters, plant their crops, traverse it with their flocks, and bury their dead within it. These physical and emotional investments give rise to new habits and new traditions as they make the land their own. In later periods of Greek history, as Beck points out, ‘the chōra was a spirited place,

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rich in signatures of divine powers, heroes, and nymphs’, and when people came to a new land, part of the process of feeling at home would have involved populating their town and chōra with the deities that inhabited, that were ‘inseparably tied to and identified with concrete places’ within the natural landscape.1 New myths are fashioned to connect the people with their rivers, springs, meadows, and mountains – with the place they come to call home. These newly founded religious connections can be mixed with reassuringly constant elements of traditional myths that the people have brought with them from their previous locations. Also, if there are people who already inhabit that location, then the indigenous religious beliefs may also have an impact on the people’s beliefs. The different prior traditions combine to create religious beliefs and cult practices that are particular to a place, a time, and the people who create it. This must have happened countless times in varying degrees, but in the Linear B tablets found at Knossos, we are able to discern this process as it was taking place – that is, as the Greek mainland religion and the people who practiced it were settling in to a new home in the Minoan territory of Knossos on Crete in the Late Minoan (LM) II–IIIA periods (ca. 1450–1330 BCE).2 To fully appreciate how this happened, we should first consider the religious practice of the Greek mainland – the religion that the Mycenaeans brought with them to Crete. The form and practice of Greek religion are hard to discern in its earliest days, as little clear evidence survives from the Middle Helladic period (ca. 2000–1700 BCE).3 Helène Whittaker, in her 2014 book devoted to this subject, points out that the Middle Helladic burial tumuli were the most conspicuous monuments of the time period, which leads her to surmise that in addition to ‘expressing new or old links between the land . . . and the people who made their living from it’, they were also ‘the focus around which communal rituals were staged’.4 Because the burials lacked prestige objects, she reasons that these rituals and the tumuli were not meant to honour one individual in particular, but the ancestors in general, who would look after the land and ensure agricultural prosperity for the community. Thus, Greek religion appears to be rooted in cult practice that situated the people, their relationship with the land, and their histories, within their landscape. Once we come to the later years of the Middle Helladic (ca. 1700 BCE) and enter into the Late Helladic (LH) I period (ca. 1550 BCE), we have a much greater supply of religious paraphernalia and iconography with 1 3

2 Beck 2020: 139, 69. Bennet 2008: 4. Wright 1994: 37; Palaima 2008; Lupack 2010; Whittaker 2014: 78.

4

Whittaker 2014: 98, 94.

Mycenaean Greek Worship in Minoan Territory

which we can investigate the foundations of Greek religion. Just when we do find evidence for Mycenaean religion in the material record, much of it (although of course not all) can be identified as having been derived originally from the Minoans, who had been developing their own distinct religion from the beginning of the Bronze Age (ca. 3000 BCE). This was true for Mycenaean iconography as well as for its cult equipment: for instance, both the Minoans and the Mycenaeans feature processions in the frescoes painted on their palatial walls, the bull and female deities figure large in their imagery, and they both used similar conical and anthropomorphic rhyta to pour their libations. It appears that around 1700 BCE – when the Minoans were entering their own most developed phase of the Neopalatial period – the Mycenaeans were starting to acquire a significant amount of wealth, and as their position on the world stage was changing for the better, their elite needed a way to proclaim their newly elevated status. Lacking the appropriate visual imagery of their own to draw on, they chose to adopt Minoan iconography for this purpose. But even in contexts such as the Shaft Grave burials of Mycenae (which span the Middle Helladic III to LH I periods: 1700–1550 BCE), where the Mycenaeans’ use of Minoan religious iconography is clearly in evidence, the local Helladic religion exercised its own power over which images and cult paraphernalia were to be adopted.5 The Greek religious values and customs that had already taken root in the localities on the mainland were in force in this development of Greek religion. These Helladic religious traditions were carried to Crete by the Mycenaeans when they took up residence at Knossos in the LH II–IIIA period, although as we will see, the power of the local place and its Cretan deities also had its effect on Mycenaean religious practice, creating a new religion that was distinct from the mainland religion and unique to its particular place and time.

The Mycenaeans in Place: The Foundations of Greek Religion A Historiographical Perspective When considering the practice of Mycenaean religion, it is worth reminding ourselves that the similarities in the physical manifestations of Mycenaean and Minoan religion were great enough that the scholars who first worked on them assumed they represented one religious system. 5

Lupack 2010: 271; Maran 2011.

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The excavator of Knossos, Arthur Evans, titled his first book on the subject Mycenaean Tree and Pillar Cult, even though he was discussing both what we now call Minoan culture as well as Mycenaean. When the book was published in 1901, Evans had just begun revealing the treasures of Knossos the year before, while Mycenae had been excavated by Heinrich Schliemann in 1876; thus, the culture discovered on Crete was at first thought to be the same as that on the mainland. As Evans continued his excavations at Knossos, he grew more certain that he had discovered the palace of Minos, the legendary king who ruled over the mythical labyrinth, the Minotaur, and, as he thought, the extensive palatial structure that he was uncovering. He therefore began calling his people the Minoans rather than continuing with the term Mycenaean. Nonetheless, despite the fact that archaeologists working on the mainland, such as Carl Blegen and Alan Wace, recognised that mainland artifacts represented a distinct culture from those found at Knossos, Evans nonetheless continued to conceive of the religions of the Minoans and the Mycenaeans as the same, believing, as he did, that the Minoans had conquered or colonised the Mycenaeans.6 This understanding of Minoan-Mycenaean religion was held for several decades: in 1927, Martin Nilsson published The Minoan-Mycenaean Religion and its Survival in Greek Religion, which was revised and republished in 1950, just two years before the Linear B tablets were deciphered. Axel Persson in his 1942 monograph, The Religion of Greece in Prehistoric Times, also discussed the ‘Minoan-Mycenaean religion’ as a single entity. But the decipherment of Linear B in 1952 by Michael Ventris demonstrated that the mainland archaeologists had been correct. The Linear B script actually represents an early form of the Greek language, and thus the Mycenaeans were certainly not Minoan, and had not been conquered by the Minoans.

The Minoans and the Mycenaeans: Distinct Ideological Systems Indeed, despite the similarities, we can see that many aspects of the two cultures’ material expression were quite different. The differences are most concretely expressed in the respective forms of each culture’s major administrative complexes, traditionally called ‘palaces’. The palatial architecture

6

See Wace 1973 (originally 1956): xxi–xxvii, and esp. n. 1, for a discussion of the evidence and for Evans’ refusal to ‘recognize any distinction between the Late Bronze Age pottery of the Mainland and of Crete’; see also Davis and Bennet 1999: 112; Bennet 2008: 5; Schoep 2018: 7.

Mycenaean Greek Worship in Minoan Territory

Figure 3.1 Plan of Knossos, with the central court as its focus. Plan from Dan Davis, Cambridge Companion to the Aegean Bronze Age, fig. 6.1, reproduced with permission of Cambridge University Press through PLSclear.

employed by the two cultures actually demonstrates that each society was organised according to substantively different principles.7 As Driessen has pointed out, the focus of a Minoan palace was its central court, which, particularly at Knossos, has been shown to have pre-existed the palatial architecture that surrounded it by several centuries (Fig. 3.1).8 The architecture that was built around the central court was meant to facilitate and aggrandise the rituals that took place there, and likely also to

7

Nakassis, Galaty and Parkinson 2010.

8

Driessen 2003; 2004.

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restrict access to them.9 Hence, the Minoan palaces are more appropriately called ‘court centres’ or ‘court buildings’.10 This more communal characteristic of Minoan society appears to date back to its very foundations: Early Minoan and Middle Minoan I mortuary evidence, which extends over an extremely lengthy time period (2800–1700 BCE), indicates that tombs were used by family groups, and little distinction is found in the grave goods. A lack of evidence for a centralised power implies that Minoan society functioned on a more hetarchical, rather than a hierarchical, basis, with the population organised into corporate groups.11 Schoep, recognising the court buildings as the prime focus of religion in Minoan society, has pointed to the several ‘high-profile complexes’ that surround the court buildings at Malia and Knossos, and proposes that these residences represent the loci of political power in the Minoan landscape.12 She calls this ‘spatial pattern “hetarchical” . . . in order to highlight the horizontal diversity . . . without the intention of implying that hierarchical relations were entirely lacking’.13 Complementary to this line of thinking is Driessen’s proposal, which is based on the size of Minoan domestic structures and their lengthy use-durations, that the social unit of Minoan society was matrilineal and matrilocal (although not matriarchal) extended families or clans that lived in large House Groups.14 Driessen also proposes that these families operated on a more hetarchical rather than hierarchical basis, with ‘political power remaining in the hands of the separate groups who probably elected or designated their representatives – the officials who were in charge of the court complex’.15 In other words, the Minoans are thought to have operated in societies that consisted of several clans that were on a par with each other, and whose representatives cooperatively (although again, not necessarily without competition) managed the religious life of the community. This type of social organisation, as we will see, is quite different from that found in contemporaneous Mycenaean Greece. We can see this hetarchical social system illustrated by the frescoes of Knossos, such as the Grandstand Fresco (Fig. 3.2), which shows a crowd gathered to watch what we presume was a religious festival being performed in the central court. The striking thing about this fresco is that no 9

10 11

12 15

Although it is estimated that still a fourth of the population of Neopalatial Knossos could have fit within the central court; Driessen 2003: 60. Driessen and Langohr 2014: 90. Meaning that its constituent elements were not ranked in relation to each other, but instead interacted on a more equal footing; see Brumfiel 1995; Schoep and Knappett 2004. 13 14 Schoep 2010: 232; 2006. Schoep 2010: 232. Driessen 2012a; 2012b. Driessen 2003: 60.

Figure 3.2 Grandstand Fresco (after a wall painting at Knossos, Heraklion Archaeological Museum). Artist Emile Gilliéron. Courtesy of the Archaeological Museum of Heraklion – Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports – Hellenic Organization of Cultural Resources Development (H.O.C.RE.D.).

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one person is singled out as more important than the rest, but rather it is a group of people – specifically a group of women – who are shown by their elaborate dress and jewellery, as well as their relative size, central positioning, and the detail with which they were rendered, to be the most significant personages at the festival. I want to stress that in this image, none of these women are singled out as more important than the others – they are all equal in size and depicted with the same level of sumptuous attire.16 This does not exclude the possibility, and I think the likelihood, that there was competition among the families, but still, this and other contemporaneous frescoes indicate that ‘power and prestige in Aegean Neopalatial society seem to derive from the strength of its successful coalitions’,17 rather than from a single personage who sat at the top of a steeply hierarchical society. Mycenaean architecture and frescoes present a very different social model from the Minoan one. The structural layout of the mainland palaces is centred on the architectural unit of the megaron and the wanax, or king, who occupied its focal room (Fig. 3.3). The aim of the megaron complex with its axial arrangement is to direct the sight and motion of the visitor through the courtyard, through the anteroom, and straight on to the main hall in which the wanax sat on his throne. The frescoes that are painted on those walls also indicate a real difference between the two cultures. At Pylos we see a religious procession in the antechamber to the throne room, and within it is a scene of feasting, complete with a lyre player, entertaining the elite guests perhaps with myths or legends (Fig. 3.4).18 As in the Minoan frescoes, no ruler is depicted, but it is likely that the sacrifice and feasting represent an event sponsored by the wanax that was designed to display his powerful position at the top of the elite hierarchy of Pylos.19 The walls of Hall 64 (see Fig. 3.2), which were part of the first megaron complex built on the Ano Englianos Hill in LH IIIA (and which was still in use with the later, LH IIIB main megaron), depicted some quite brutal handto-hand combat scenes (Fig. 3.5). The naval scene depicted in Room 65 – the megaron itself – could have represented ‘a ceremony of religious character, conducted for the sake of the larger community during the month of po-rowi-to’, but which ‘would also have served as illustrations of state power and

16 18

19

17 Chapin 2011: 513. Ibid. For discussions of Mycenaean artistic scenes representing myths and legends, some akin to those found in Homeric epic, see e.g. Warren 1979; S. P. Morris 1989; Blakolmer 2007: 218–23; and now Stocker and Davis 2017. The ‘missing ruler’ is the source of much discussion; see e.g. Shelmerdine 1999; Bennet 2007; Blakolmer 2019; Davis and Bennet 1999; Galaty 1999; Palaima 2004; Wright 2004.

Mycenaean Greek Worship in Minoan Territory

Figure 3.3 Plan of Pylos, with the megaron complex as its focus. Plan J. Travlos. Courtesy of the Palace of Nestor Excavations, the Department of Classics, University of Cincinnati.

expertise in maritime affairs’.20 The ideological message of Hall 64 and Room 65 is significant as these walls would have been visible to those assembled in Court 63 – an area that was likely used to host the large feasts sponsored by the wanax.21 And indeed, the themes of the frescoes in Hall 64 seem to be typical of those painted in other palatial megara: the fresco fragments found in the megaron at Mycenae indicate a battle scene, and fragments found at Tiryns (in a secondary context) depict a boar hunt.22 In addition, in the LH II–IIIA1 ashlar masonry building at Iklaina, a naval scene was depicted, ‘perhaps as a means of displaying power’.23 The contrast is clear: at Knossos, the focus of Minoan society’s court building 20

21 23

Davis and Bennet 1999, pls. 13, 14; Brecoulaki et al. 2015: 284; see also Egan and Brecoulaki 2015. 22 Davis and Bennet 1999: 110. Chapin 2014: 45, 49. Cosmopoulos 2015: 253; Chapin 2014: 41.

75

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Figure 3.4 Reconstruction of the fresco from the throne room at Pylos depicting the lyre player and men feasting (note the position of the bull is tentative). Artist P. de Jong. Courtesy of the Palace of Nestor Excavations, the Department of Classics, University of Cincinnati.

is the communal religious ceremonies that went on within the central court, while in mainland palatial structures, the focus is squarely on the wanax and the power that he projected via his architectural setting and the visual iconography that surrounded him.

The Helladic Roots of Mycenaean Religion Given the contrast in the two societies’ ideological priorities, it will not be surprising that a closer look at the Mycenaean religious iconography reveals that the Mycenaeans did not adopt all that they found in Minoan religion. Maran discusses the fact that even during the Shaft Grave era, the point at which the use of Minoan iconography is most prevalent (MH III– LH I), distinct mainland characteristics can be discerned, particularly in the ‘gold masks, weapon assemblages, jewellery and martial iconography’,

Mycenaean Greek Worship in Minoan Territory

Figure 3.5 Hand-to-hand combat scenes depicted in frescos from Hall 64 at Pylos (left, 22H64, and right, 25H64). Artist P. de Jong. Courtesy of the Palace of Nestor Excavations, the Department of Classics, University of Cincinnati.

which have no parallel in the Minoan world.24 Furthermore, certain specialised cult rooms that were common in Minoan architecture just do not exist on the mainland. For instance, at least twenty-seven of the distinctive sunken cult rooms called lustral basins have been found on Neopalatial Crete, and they had a wide distribution, being found in court buildings, villas, and elite residences.25 Lustral basins were also found at the Cycladic 24

Maran 2011: 284.

25

Gesell 1985: 22.

77

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Figure 3.5 (cont.)

sites of Akrotiri on Thera, Phylakopi on Melos, and Hagia Irini on Keos, indicating that the people living at those sites were choosing to adopt this very distinctive Minoan religious cult room. In contrast, there are no lustral basins whatsoever at any mainland site. To take another example, cave and peak sanctuaries, which were a large part of the Minoan religious landscape, are not found on the mainland in the same form or with the same types of votive offerings as are found on Crete.26 Furthermore, the textual evidence for Mycenaean religion (which is found on several series of tablets, such as the Fr, Fn, and Ep and En series), as it was practiced on the mainland, demonstrates its strong Helladic nature.27 Fortunately, the wanax and his administration at Pylos were concerned with keeping track of the religious offerings that were sent out to the various deities and their sanctuaries. Another concern was the gathering of food, wine, and sacrificial animals for religious festivals. From such tablets, we have learned a great deal about the deities that the 26

27

On cave sanctuaries, see Tyree 2013; on peak sanctuaries, see C. Morris and Peatfield 2002; 2021; Kyriakidis 2006. See Lambrinoudakis 1981 and Romano and Voyatzis 2014 for Mycenaean hilltop shrines, and Lupack 2021 for a discussion of Mycenaeans’ use of open-air shrines as possible locations of ecstatic worship. See also Warren 1988 for the distinction between enacted and ecstatic epiphanies. And see C. Morris and Peatfield 2002 and 2021 for ecstatic worship in Minoan contexts. Lupack 2010; 2020.

Mycenaean Greek Worship in Minoan Territory

Mycenaeans worshipped and the festivals they celebrated. The Fr series, with its 51 tablets predominantly recording offerings of perfumed oil, is particularly informative.28 For instance, we can see that Poseidon held a very prominent position at Pylos as he is sent offerings of perfumed oil on three Fr tablets, one of them being Fr 1224. .1a pa-ko-we , e-ti-we .1 pa-ki-ja-ni-jo-jo⸤ ⸥me-no , po-se-da-o-ne +PA  2 For Poseidon, in the month of pa-ki-ja-ne, sage-scented, henna-dyed oil.

In addition, on PY Tn 316 v.1, Poseidon’s sanctuary – the po-si-da-i-jo, or Posidaion – is specified as one of the locations to which offerings of gold vases were sent; we also have a female version of his name, po-si-da-e-ja – receiving offerings on the same tablet. Zeus also receives offerings on Tn 316, along with the female version of Zeus – di-wi-ja, or Dione – while Fr 1230 records an amount of oil being sent to the sanctuary of Zeus: di-wi-jo-de

+A  1

To the Diwion, oil for use as ointment.

The tablets also record several other names of the canonical Olympian deities on mainland tablets, including Hera, Artemis, Hermes, Ares, and Dionysos; Athena, Hephaistos, and perhaps a reference to Apollo can be added to the list of Olympian deities as they appear on Cretan Linear B tablets. Two other Greek deities who receive offerings of oil in the Fr series are the Divine Mother (ma-te-re te-i-ja) on Fr 1202 and the Thrice Hero (ti-ri-se-ro-e), who appears on both Fr 1204 and Tn 316, confirming that hero worship was practised by the Mycenaeans.29 The most prominent female deity on the Pylos tablets is po-ti-ni-ja, or Potnia. The Indo-European root of her name simply means ‘power’, and thus her name can be translated as ‘She Who Wields Power’. The term po-tini-ja often appears on its own, but also frequently with an epithet that relates either to a location or to the sphere that she governs. For instance, she is po-ti-ni-ja i-qe-ja, Potnia Hippeia, Mistress of the Horses, on PY An 1281.1; si-to-po-ti-ni-ja, Mistress of the Grain, on MY Oi 701.3; and on Fr 1231 the cult servants called the Thirsty Ones receive an offering of oil for her: .1 po-ti-ni-ja , di-pi[-si-]jo-i te[ _ __ .2 ke-se-ni-wi-jo[ _ ]  1 [ To the dipsioi (or Thirsty Ones), for Potnia, [Oil] suitable for guests (?), oil.

28

Shelmerdine 1985; Bendall 2007; Lupack 2014; 2016.

29

See Lupack 2014; 2020.

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In addition to the names of the deities, the tablets demonstrate that the structure of Mycenaean religion also looks very Helladic: several tablets, such as Fr 1224 mentioned above, record that the offering was to be sent within a certain month, which indicates that the Mycenaeans had a set religious calendar. Also, it seems that those month names corresponded to the festivals that occurred within them: for instance, the month of pa-ki-ja-ne is the month of Sphagianes, or of sacrifice (presumably a specific one that was conducted in that month), and the month of po-ro-wi-to on Tn 316 appears to designate the month of Sailing – perhaps a celebration marking the time when sailing became possible again in the Mediterranean. This gives us a framework that is very similar to the historical religion of Archaic and Classical Greece.30 In addition, the tablets provide the names of specific festivals: the Divine Mother on Fr 1202 was to receive her offering at the Festival of the New Wine (me-tu-wo ne-wo); this sounds very like the festival that celebrated the opening of the wine jars on the first day of the historical ritual of the Anthesterion.31 Fr 1222 gives us a festival called to-no-e-ke-te-ri-jo. The to-no part of the word is taken to represent *thórnos (thrónos), or throne, giving us a festival centred around the throne, which may have been held in honour of the ancestral wanax mythologically credited with founding the Mycenaean culture.32 A third festival recorded at Pylos is the re-ke-(e-) to-ro-te-ri-jo, or ‘Lechestroterion’, which most likely has to do with ‘the Preparation of the Couch’ for the ieros gamos, or the sacred wedding.33 Complementing the Linear B tablet festivals is the iconographic portrayals of processions with celebrants bearing offerings and leading animals to be sacrificed, which are found at every Mycenaean palatial site. Several tablets provide the practical details of the preparations for such religious festivals in that they record not only the collection of the sacrificial animals, food, and wine, but also the inventories of the equipment needed to sacrifice and roast the animals, and the religious personnel, such as the i-je-ro-wo-ko, or iero-worgos (ἱερο-ƒοργός), a word that appears in historical Greek (ἱερουγός, ἱεροεργός), who was to officiate over the sacrifice itself. This brief sketch of the evidence we have for Mycenaean religion demonstrates that, overall, the religion found on the Linear B tablets is certainly recognisable as Greek.

30 32 33

31 Lupack 2020. Pithoigia; Ventris and Chadwick 1973: 480; Aura Jorro 1999: 446. Ventris and Chadwick 1973: 482, 586; Aura Jorro 1993: 362; Palaima 2008: 350; Lupack 2014. Aura Jorro 1993: 237; Shelmerdine 2016: 276.

Mycenaean Greek Worship in Minoan Territory

Given the Helladic nature of Mycenaean religion as demonstrated by the textual evidence, we are challenged to understand what the adoption of Minoan cult paraphernalia and iconography for its expression meant for the Mycenaeans. Did the Mycenaeans have little or no understanding of Minoan belief? Or, did the Mycenaeans recognise, understand, and knowingly take on aspects of Minoan religion into their own set of beliefs? I believe the latter viewpoint holds more weight – after all, Minoan symbols were retained and repeated for centuries, from 1700 BCE until they appear on the walls of the Cult Centre at Mycenae in 1250 BCE and beyond; this was not a passing phase.34 To explain this phenomenon, I have proposed that the Mycenaeans only adopted from the Minoans what fitted comfortably within their own Helladic religion.35 While I still think this was true to a certain extent, I now think that the situation must have been more complex. It seems likely that in adopting Minoan symbols and cult equipment, the Mycenaeans would have also absorbed some of the Minoan religion into their own cult practice. Even the physical actions, such as pouring libations with a bull’s head rhyton or making an offering before an altar frescoed with images of deities whose dress, and perhaps identity, derived from Minoan deities can, I think, produce emotional responses in the worshipper, which would thereby have initiated new thought processes and beliefs. Once this occurs, aspects of the foreign religion are no longer foreign – they become one’s own culture, one’s own beliefs. Thus, the late Mycenaean Lion Gate (ca. 1250 BCE), which is such an iconic image of Mycenaean power, actually draws on iconography that had been well established in Minoan times.36 Images of lions and griffins on either side of a male or female deity, and on either side of a column, are found on both Minoan and Mycenaean seals.37 Thus, in 1250 BCE the wanax of the Mycenaeans’ most powerful state drew upon longestablished, originally Minoan iconography to express his message. Of course, he put it to use in his own way: although the imagery was common in Minoan contexts, it had never been implemented in such a monumental way. It was the Mycenaean wanax who chose that image, had it carved into stone, and placed it prominently above the main entry gate into Mycenae, an arrangement meant to announce his power to every

34 37

35 36 Maran 2011: 289; Davis and Stocker 2016. Lupack 2010. Blakolmer 2011. Which are largely interchangeable; Blakolmer 2011; 2016: esp. 131, fig. 24; Blackwell 2014: 466, 473–74; Galanakis, Tsitsa and Günkel-Maschek 2017: fig. 30.

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individual who approached his citadel.38 This iconography had become Mycenaean. And this transformation seems to have occurred, or was in the process of occurring, in the time period at which the Mycenaeans took up residence at Knossos – the LH II period, ca. 1500 BCE, a good 200 years after the Mycenaeans were first adopting Minoan iconography. We are fortunate that Davis and Stocker have recently found at Pylos a shaft grave burial of a thirty- to thirty-five-year-old male, dubbed the Griffin Warrior, which dates to precisely this time period.39 The burial was entirely untouched until the date of its discovery, which allows us to speak to the intentionality of the selection of grave goods and their meaning for those who buried them with their deceased warrior. In addition to weapons and armour, the artifacts included over 50 sealstones, four gold rings, a bronze finial depicting a bull’s head that would have been fitted on a staff, a bronze mirror, and ivory combs.40 These items are echoed by the imagery found on the gold rings that were chosen to accompany these objects – one ring depicts a Minoantype goddess holding aloft a staff topped with bull’s horns, a second shows an athletic male figure just alighting after leaping over a running bull, and a third depicts a worshipper offering a bull’s horn to a seated Minoan goddess who is holding an object that could be a mirror.41 On the largest gold ring a Minoan ritual scene is shown with the goddess and her worshippers dancing and singing around a shrine, while the seal stone dubbed the ‘Combat Agate’ by Stocker and Davis returns us to the warrior imagery with an ascendant male figure clearly made heroic by his near nudity and long hair flowing behind him as he sinks his sword into his armoured opponent’s neck (Fig. 3.6).42 The interplay between the physical objects chosen as grave goods and the representations of bulls, horns, combs, mirrors, and warriors whose long hair is picked out in detail, all in relation with the ritual worship of the goddess, has brought Davis and Stocker to conclude that the ‘interrelationships among artifacts and representational elements demonstrate that mainlanders at Pylos, at the start of the Late Bronze Age, already attached symbolic meaning to the rings’.43 It is this distinct cultural mindset that the Mycenaeans must have brought to Knossos in LH II–IIIA. On the mainland, Mycenaean religion 38 40 43

39 Wright 1987. Davis and Stocker 2016; Stocker and Davis 2017. 41 42 Davis and Stocker 2016: 632. Ibid.: 637–39, 643–46. Ibid.: 640–43; 2017. Ibid.: 650.

Mycenaean Greek Worship in Minoan Territory

Figure 3.6 (a) Combat agate from the Griffin Warrior’s shaft grave at Pylos; (b) drawing of the scene depicted on the combat agate. Artist T. Ross. Courtesy of the Palace of Nestor Excavations, the Department of Classics, University of Cincinnati.

had taken shape by incorporating much that was Minoan, perhaps even some of its beliefs, but Mycenaean culture and religion was still emphatically not Minoan; the Helladic identity and traditions borne of the mainland had been maintained despite the active adoption of a sophisticated culture’s iconography. What happened to that religion when the Mycenaeans moved into Knossos and took a hand in the administration of its economy? Is the religion that the Mycenaeans brought with them to Crete and practised in Minoan territory the same as that on the mainland? Or can we see signs that it was affected by the new place that it was taking up residence in, and if so, to what extent?

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Within Minoan Territory: The Effects of a New Place on Mycenaean Religion Upheaval on Crete and a New Power Base at Knossos It should also be recognised that Minoan Crete was experiencing a major upheaval at this time: at the end of the LM IB period (ca. 1450 BCE), there is a major horizon of destructions across Crete – all of the palatial sites and many of its villas, except, significantly, Knossos, were destroyed by fire. Knossos emerges from this time to become the dominant force over the island. It is clear, though, that Knossos also experienced a major change at this time: prior to the destructions, the script being used at Knossos (and across the island) was Linear A, which represents the undeciphered language of the Minoans. After the destructions, palatial documents are no longer written in Linear A, but rather in Linear B – in other words, Mycenaean Greek replaces the Minoan language for economic and administrative purposes.44 Alongside the change in the script there are also changes in material culture and burial practices; for instance, many graves around Knossos, the so-called warrior graves, were found to have weapons and armour interred with the deceased, something which the Neopalatial Minoans had not done.45 The potential cause of the destructions has been variously put down to natural disasters, uprisings from within, a power grab by the leaders of Knossos, and an invasion by the Mycenaeans.46 Perhaps it was some combination of these, with the Mycenaeans coming in to support the clans, or a particular clan, of Knossos in their ambitions. It has also been debated whether the Mycenaean cultural elements evident in the material record at Knossos (and elsewhere on Crete) in LM II–IIIA period are the result of a full-on Mycenaean conquest and colonisation effort, or if they reflect choices made by Knossians to align themselves with the now dominant Aegean strategy by emulating (in part) the Mycenaean culture.47 Again, the truth is likely a combination of these possibilities. Based on the Linear B evidence, it is indisputable that the Mycenaeans had a military presence at Knossos. On the Knossos tablet Fh 392, we find a contingent of military men described as u-ru-pi-ja-jo, or Olympians, and two tablets (KN B 164, Xd 146.4) refer to the i-ja-wo-ne, or Ionians.48 While Driessen sees these contingents as mercenaries supporting a 44 47

48

45 46 Bennet 2008. Preston 1999; 2004. Warren 2001. Driessen and Farnoux 1994; Driessen 1998–99; Preston 2004; Driessen and Langohr 2007; Knappett 2016. Driessen and Macdonald 1984: esp. 52; Chadwick 1977; Driessen 1998–99.

Mycenaean Greek Worship in Minoan Territory

Knossian ruler, I think these contingents could have been part of the military force that supported the Mycenaean presence and administration at Knossos (see below for further discussion on this point).49 It is also clear from the tablets that the Mycenaeans were practising their own religion at Knossos, keeping records of offerings in the same way that they had on the mainland.

Early Days at Knossos: Harking back to the Mainland The textual evidence for this Mycenaean cult practice is particularly enlightening, and, thanks to the fact that tablets have been preserved from two different time periods at Knossos, we can even see some changes over time. The majority of the Knossos tablets date to the final destruction of the palace, the most commonly accepted time period for which is an ‘advanced LM IIIA2 date’, ca. 1340–1330 BCE, although the beginning of LM IIIB1 (ca. 1300 BCE) is also a possibility.50 We are, however, extremely fortunate that a deposit of tablets was preserved from an earlier time period as they were sealed by a fire destruction early in the LM IIIA1 period (ca. 1390 BCE).51 This deposit is called the Room of the Chariot Tablets (RCT) because over a third of the tablets (the Sc and Vc series) record allocations of military equipment (armour, horses, and chariots) to men who are recorded by their personal names. The men’s names on these records have been identified as overwhelmingly Greek: Driessen concluded that at least seventy to ninety per cent of the names in the RCT tablets are Greek, and Firth’s (2016) analysis of the names in the RCT series Sc and Vc 1 predicted that Greek names would make up ninety per cent of the male personal names.52 For comparison, Firth’s linguistical analysis finds that Greek names make up approximately fifty-seven per cent of the total number of male personal names when analysing the entire Knossos corpus. The high percentage of Greek names in the earlier RCT tablets serves to indicate the military presence of Mycenaeans in Knossos at this time (although the nature and scale of that presence is still open for debate). Religious tablets were also found amongst the RCT tablets, and the deities’ names on those tablets align with the high percentage of Greek personal names. KN V 52, one of our most informative tablets in the RCT

49 50 52

Driessen 1998–99; see also Driessen and Langohr 2007. Driessen and Langohr 2014: 96; see also Driessen 2008: 69, 71. Driessen 1998–99: 191–92; Firth 2016: 399.

51

Driessen 2008: 71–72.

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group, records offerings of an unknown commodity to each of the deities listed: .1 a-ta-na-po-ti-ni-ja 1 u[ ]vest.[ _ .2 e-nu-wa-ri-jo 1 pa-ja-wo-ne 1 po-se-da[-o-ne Lat. inf. [[e-ri-nu-we , pe-ro ]] [ __

Remarkably, the first deity is a-ta-na-po-ti-ni-ja, or Potnia of Athanas, which is understood to be the genitive singular of Athens. Thus, we have the Potnia of Athens, who would later become known simply as Athena. Gregory Nagy has referred to the appearance of Athena at Knossos as the ‘smoking gun that may possibly prove the Athenian provenience of at least some of the “Mycenaeans” who ran the administration of Knossos around 1400 B.C.’.53 Mycenologists are somewhat more cautious about attributing the identity of the Mycenaeans at Knossos on this basis, but the presence of this particular po-ti-ni-ja in an assemblage that is largely concerned with military matters is taken to indicate that Athena’s purview over warfare was already set in the Bronze Age.54 The name of the second deity on line one is too poorly preserved to reconstruct, but three names are clear in the second line: e-nu-wa-ri-jo, or Enyalios; pa-ja-wo-ne, or Paiawon; and po-se-da-o-ne, or Poseidon. The first two of these were used in historical Greek as epithets for Olympian deities: Enyalios for Ares, and Paiawon for Apollo. It may have been that these names referred to deities in their own right at this time, but it is also possible that they were already associated with Ares and Apollo, and thereby served to indicate their worship. It has also been proposed that Enyalios may have ‘had a special connection with Crete during the Bronze Age’.55 Poseidon seems already to have been one of the Mycenaean’s most prominent deities on the mainland, and ‘the formation of Poseidon as a god of the sea, of earthquakes, and of horses was a Mycenaean development’.56 The name of the deity e-ri-nu-we, or the dative singular of Erinys, the Fury, also appeared on the lower edge of the tablet, but then for some reason was erased. Regardless of the scribe’s second thoughts about this offering, the fact that he initially wrote the name serves to indicate the existence of this deity in the Mycenaean pantheon. Another significant RCT tablet, KN F 51, records offerings of wheat, with Zeus on the second line. An offering to wa, standing for the term wanax, also appears on F 51. Elsewhere I have proposed that when a tablet

53 56

Nagy 2015, section 4. Shelmerdine 2016: 283.

54

Gulizio, Pluta and Palaima 2001: 459–60.

55

Ibid.: 459.

Mycenaean Greek Worship in Minoan Territory

specifies that the (or a) wanax receives religious offerings, it was not the living king who was the object of religious worship, but rather an ancestral king who was mythologised as the founding wanax of the Mycenaeans.57 On KN Xd 97, we see the female Zeus di-wi-ja with a woman named di-wije-ja, a name that could in this context indicate that she is the priestess of di-wi-ja. Deities’ names do appear in contexts other than strictly cultic ones: for instance, KN Vc 293 records a man named after Zeus, di-wi-ja-wo (this personal name also appears at Thebes), and a-re-jo on KN Vc 208 shows that men could also be named after Ares. Thus far, all of the deities mentioned are found in historical Greek, but on KN V 114 and Xd 140 we see the name of a deity that we can recognise as most likely Minoan: pa-ze. It seems that from the beginning the Mycenaeans recognised pa-ze as a very important deity at Knossos – one they could not afford to offend. Taking into account both assemblages of Knossos tablets, the RCT and the tablets associated with the LM IIIA2 period, pa-ze is the most frequently named deity in the Linear B tablets of Knossos – but one that does not appear at all on the mainland. The Mycenaeans thus seem to have begun at this time to worship some of the most powerful deities that they encountered at Knossos, and perhaps their long history of involvement with the Minoans and Minoan religion, as well as the political situation they were in, inclined them to do so. They also sent offerings to a rather significant, and very local, cult place: on KN Xd 140 we also find da-pu-ri-to – the Labyrinth; this will be discussed further below. Gulizio, Pluta, and Palaima have proposed that all of the deities on F 51 – the Mistress of Athens, Enuwalios/Ares, Paiawon/Apollo, and Poseidon – can be related to military matters, and so fit well with the main theme of the chariot and armour allocation tablets they were found with.58 But more importantly in this context, Gulizio, Pluta, and Palaima have also pointed out the fact that the majority of the deities on the RCT records are Greek.59 It seems to make sense that, in what may have been uncertain, if not potentially hostile, territory, the Mycenaeans propitiated the gods that were familiar to them, the gods from their own local place. Despite their familiarity with Minoan religion, it seems that they wanted to invoke the presence of the deities of their own homeland, their own place. 57

58 59

As he does on the mainland: e.g. PY Fr 1215.1, 1220.2, 1227, and 1235.1. Lupack 2014; 2016. See also Palaima 1995: 129 and Carlier 1984: 131, for the proposals that it was the living wanax who received the offerings (because of the prominent religious role he played in Mycenaean society) or that it was a deity such as Poseidon, respectively. Gulizio, Pluta and Palaima 2001; Gulizio 2011: 136. Gulizio, Pluta and Palaima 2001: 455.

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This predominance of Greek deities on the RCT tablets actually stands in contrast to the archaeological evidence of the time. Although there was a good deal of new construction at Knossos at the start of the LM II period, the architectural layout of the shrine rooms in the western wing of the court building and, it seems, many of the traditional rituals conducted within them seem to have remained ostensibly much the same despite the change from the Neopalatial Minoan period to the LM II period.60 For instance, the Pillar Crypts were still in use as shrines, although in the later LM IIIA or IIIB period they were used as storerooms.61 In addition, the Minoan frescoes of processions and drinking ceremonies continued or were renewed during this time.62 The most crucial and highly debated question is whether the throne and the frescoes depicting griffins and date palms flanking it were newly created in LM II, i.e. was the throne built for a newly minted wanax in Mycenaean fashion, or had they been established by the Minoans in the Neopalatial period, perhaps as part of a ritual involving the enacted epiphany of a Minoan goddess.63 The most recent analysis of the archaeological evidence indicates that while the walls of the Throne Room were rebuilt in the LM II period, the ground plan established in the previous Minoan Neopalatial period was adhered to in that renovation.64 Furthermore, the lustral basin opposite the throne had been part of that original plan, and continued in use into the LM IIIA period, the time when Mycenaeans were administering the palatial economic system.65 The fresco, then, must have been painted afresh on those LM II walls, but Galanakis, Tsitsa, and Günkel-Maschek demonstrate that the iconographic links between date palm trees, griffins, enthroned figures, and lustral basins are significant enough to conclude that ‘in the Neopalatial version of the “Throne Room” at Knossos, the lustral basin coexisted with a throne of some kind, or at least a seated figure’, and that ‘the artistic, and perhaps ideological, foundations of the scene decorating the Throne Room at Knossos were indeed Neopalatial in origin’.66 Thus, there is likely to have been a good degree of continuity between the

60

61 62 63

64 65 66

Gesell 1985: 41; Driessen and Langohr 2007: 181–83; see Gulizio 2011: 137–65, for a detailed discussion of the archaeological evidence. Gesell 1985: 26; Gulizio 2011: 149–50. And into the LM IIIA period; Driessen and Langohr 2007: 181–83. It is thought that enacted epiphanies were also part of Mycenaean religion; Rehak 1995; Maran and Stavrianopoulou 2007: 290. Galanakis, Tsitsa and Günkel-Maschek 2017; Günkel-Maschek pers. comm. Günkel-Maschek pers. comm. See Gulizio 2011: 160. Galanakis, Tsitsa and Günkel-Maschek 2017: 83.

Mycenaean Greek Worship in Minoan Territory

Neopalatial and the LM II–IIIA period in the Throne Room’s fresco as well, although, as we will see, new visual elements were also incorporated.67 Goodison’s astronomical findings provide further, although indirect, evidence in support of the continuity of the religious use of the Throne Room. Goodison discovered that the throne and the lustral basin were constructed precisely where they were in order that the rising midwinter and midsummer sun’s rays would shine directly onto the person seated or standing, respectively, on the throne or in the lustral basin.68 The fact that the positioning of the throne and the lustral basin was related to the original layout of the Central Court supports the idea that the throne must first have been built by the Minoans. The astronomical alignments were accommodated in the new LM II construction plan, which indicates that whoever commissioned the renovation work in LM II anticipated the continued use of the rooms for their original cult purpose.69 But there were significant changes made as well: through a detailed examination of iconographic comparanda, Galanakis, Tsitsa, and GünkelMaschek demonstrate that the imagery used in the fresco in the Throne Room looks both backward and forward in time. They conclude, ‘we see the inclusion of both “traditional” (Neopalatial) and “innovative” (Final Palatial [LM II–IIIA]) elements in the composition as suggestive of an attempt on behalf of the artist(s) and the commissioner(s) to blend artistic traditions in the creation of a new, yet still recognizable, image of power’ fashioned in order to support ‘Knossos’ sole rulership on Crete’, which was based on ‘the emergence of the wanax ideology’.70 The identity of the ‘commissioner’ may have been, as Galanakis, Tsitsa, and Günkel-Maschek prefer, a Knossian Minoan elite, or it may have been, as they acknowledge, a Mycenaean ruler.71 I think the situation must have been a complex one – we know that the percentage of Greek names in the later Knossos tablets is approximately fifty-seven per cent, which implies that by the LM IIIA2 period, Minoans and Mycenaeans were working side by side in the administration of Crete’s economic resources.72 Perhaps in the creation of the visual imagery of this new Throne Room, the two authorities had joined

67

68 70 71

I warmly thank Ute Günkel-Maschek for discussing these issues with me and for providing crucial evidence concerning the chronology of the Throne Room’s construction. 69 Goodison 2001; 2004. Gulizio 2011: 195. Galanakis, Tsitsa and Günkel-Maschek 2017: 47, 92. 72 Ibid.: 92; see also Driessen and Langohr 2007. Firth 2016.

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forces to ensure that their new, now rather more hierarchical than hetarchical, form of government would be accepted and supported by the local population, by drawing heavily upon the past, while still adding enough to distinguish the new LM II power from that of the previous Neopalatial period. As the fresco in the Throne Room shows, legitimation by the divine sphere was a key element in the promotion of the new regime. Nonetheless, the Linear B tablets from the Early LH IIIA period were dominated by Greek deities. Perhaps at this point the Greeks and the Minoans were still conducting their religious observances separately; it is clear that when it came to their own cult practice – that which we see illustrated in the RCT Linear B tablets – the Mycenaeans largely kept to the worship of deities that evoked their homeland – at least at first.

Settling in and Transforming the New Place into Home In the LM IIIA2 assemblage of Knossos tablets, which were written perhaps sixty years after the RCT tablets, we see a rather different picture. Among the LM IIIA2 tablets, the Fp series records cult offerings of olive oil (likely perfumed) being sent to various deities and their shrines in the same pattern as that seen on the Fr tablets. Fp 1 is our most complete tablet and is worth considering in detail as it presents a number of religious recipients: .1 .2 .3 .4 .5 .6 .7 .8 .9 .10 .11 .12

de-u-ki-jo-jo ‘me-no’ di-ka-ta-jo / di-we   1 da-da-re-jo-de   2 pa-de   1 pa-si-te-o-i  1 qe-ra-si-ja   1[ a-mi-ni-so , / pa-si-te-o-i  1 [ e-ri-nu ,   3 *47-da-de   1 a-ne-mo , / i-je-re-ja  4 vacat to-so  3  2  2

In the month of Deukios: For Diktaian Zeus To the Sanctuary of Daidalos For the god pa-de For all of the Gods For the Goddess of the Beasts For all of the Gods at Amnisos For the Fury To *47-da For the Priestess of the Winds

9.6 litres oil 19.2 litres oil 9.6 litres oil 28.8 litres oil 9.6 litres oil 9.6 litres oil 4.8 litres oil 1.6 litres oil 6.4 litres oil

Total:

108.8 litres oil

Fp 1 starts by stating that these offerings were to be made in the month of de-u-ki-jo. This notation informs us that the Mycenaeans on Crete were following a sacred calendar, as they did on the mainland. The deity who is given pride of place here, by being listed first under the heading, is Zeus, whom we have already seen on the RCT tablets. But now, after the Mycenaeans have been living on Crete for a couple of generations, he has

Mycenaean Greek Worship in Minoan Territory

become Diktaian Zeus, Zeus of Mount Dikte – a very local, Cretan manifestation of the Greek god. The Mycenaeans living at Knossos had come to associate their Zeus with one of the more important cave sanctuaries on Crete, one which had been a focus of worship for the Minoans from the Early Minoan period (ca. 2800 BCE) and which continued to receive votives through the Mycenaean period and into the Geometric.73 In addition, the placename DI-KI-TE appears in the Minoan Linear A script inscribed on religious objects, which has prompted some scholars to propose that the myth of a prominent male deity being born and raised in the Diktaian cave dates to the Bronze Age, and may even have been an adaptation of a Minoan myth.74 Whether it is right to project this myth back into Minoan times is of course a matter of conjecture, but the votive offerings found within the cave on Mount Dikte demonstrate that the Mycenaeans made this sacred place their own by having one of their prime deities take up residence within it. This implantation of Zeus in the Cretan landscape would have served to provide the Mycenaeans on Crete with firm roots in the place, as well as a legitimation for their possession of the land. ‘Our God was born here – of course we belong here.’ They were creating their ontological relationship with the new landscape by projecting their deities – which were in a way representative of themselves – onto it. The creation of the Mycenaeans’ particular ontology of place is further shown on line 3 of Fp 1, which records another local sacred place: the offering is being sent to a sanctuary called the Daidaleion – the Sanctuary of Daidalos. Complementing this cult site are the offerings recorded on two other contemporaneous tablets, KN Gg 702 and Oa 745.2, which are sent to da-pu2-ri-to-jo po-ti-ni-ja – Potnia of the Labyrinth. We saw the cult site of the Labyrinth recorded on the RCT tablet Xd 140 above, but in that case, it stood on its own. By the LM IIIA2 period, the sacred Labyrinth is marked off as belonging to Potnia, the Mycenaeans’ most prominent female deity. Like Zeus, these tablets make it clear that Mycenaean Potnia had by LM IIIA2 found a home within the Knossian landscape, and it seems likely that she took up residence in a place that matched her in terms of religious significance. The mythological constellation of Daidalos, the Labyrinth, its goddess Potnia, and the Bull (which was of course very prominent in the iconography of the Minoans) must have been a strong one for the

73 74

Hogarth 1899–1900; Boardman 1961. The Linear A sign group DI-KI-TE was inscribed on objects found at the peak sanctuaries associated with both Knossos (one example) and Palaikastro (four inscriptions); Crowther 2000: 148; MacGillivray 2000: 126.

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Mycenaeans, one which retained its weight into the Greek historical periods, with Potnia perhaps becoming Ariadne and the bull becoming the Minotaur. I might note that it is sometimes said that the complicated structure of the palace of Knossos gave rise in popular memory – after the collapse of the Bronze Age – to the myth of Daidalos and the Labyrinth. But these names were already tied to the place of Knossos in the Bronze Age, and were the subject of cult by ca. 1400 BCE, and perhaps much earlier. Because of these Bronze Age religious associations, MacGillivray has proposed that the myths which we encounter in historical Greek times concerning Daidalos and the Labyrinth derive from Mycenaean, if not Minoan times.75 To continue with Fp 1, on line 4 we see the Minoan deity pa-ze who had received offerings from the Mycenaeans in the previous period – but here we see that pa-ze, which likely reflected an approximation of the Minoan pronunciation, has lost the palatalisation of the ‘dje’ sound and has been simplified to pa-de, probably because this was just an easier way for the Greeks to pronounce the deity’s name. This change of spelling is used consistently across all the LM IIIA2 tablets, so in a sense, the name has been Mycenaeanised – one wonders if the deity had also been Mycenaeanised. On the next line we see oil being sent to pa-si-te-o-i – to all the gods – without any further specification, which most likely means by default, ‘to all the gods at Knossos’. On line 7 we see pa-si-te-o-i again, but in this instance the gods are located at Amnisos, a site seven kilometres to the east of Knossos.76 The use of pa-si-te-o-i is comparatively common in the religious texts at Knossos, appearing eleven times in all. In contrast, on the mainland, offerings are sent to the te-o-i of certain locations, but it is only at Knossos that the more anonymous term ‘all’ is added in order to encompass an unknown number of gods. As Gulizio points out, it appears that the Mycenaeans were making an effort to cover themselves – they wanted to make sure that they did not anger any local gods by inadvertently neglecting to honour them.77 They solved this problem by simply sending offerings addressed to the blanket term ‘all the gods’. This 75 76

77

MacGillivray 2000. Minoan Amnisos is known for its Neopalatial villa, which was destroyed in the LM 1A period. Amnisos must have continued to be important in the succeeding periods despite the loss of its villa because it figures prominently on the Linear B tablets, something which we Mycenologists are grateful for because it was one of the primary words that provided a key to Michael Ventris in his decipherment of Linear B. Gulizio 2011: 265–66.

Mycenaean Greek Worship in Minoan Territory

constitutes evidence that the Mycenaeans respected the deities of the Minoan land, accepted their potential to affect their lives, and accordingly, were careful to pay due respect to them. Two other Minoan deities are recorded on Fp 1: line 6 records the deity qe-ra-si-ja, which Gulizio identifies as a Minoan deity on the basis of a persuasive linguistic argument, although it may represent Therasia, which would relate this deity to wild animals, and serve as an epithet of a deity akin to Artemis; line nine gives us *47-da-de, a toponym whose initial syllabogram, *47, represents a sound that is not found on mainland tablets, and thus most likely represents a Minoan shrine dedicated to an important, likely Minoan, deity.78 Gulizio also details the names of a few additional Minoan theonyms that are found on the Knossos Linear B tablets: pi-pi-tuna, mba-ti, pa-sa-ja, and si-ja-ma-to.79 By worshipping these indigenous deities the Mycenaeans were not only acknowledging their power, but in a sense they were making them their own as well.

The Force of Local Horizons The difference between the RCT tablets and those of the LM IIIA2 period is exemplified by KN Fp 1: in the LM IIIA2 period, after the Mycenaeans had established themselves on Crete, the deities they brought with them from their old home have become more associated with their new locality. We do not have just Zeus, but Diktaian Zeus. We do not just have Potnia, but Potnia of the Labyrinth. In a major back ripple, the Minoan land is now being reimagined and fully possessed by the very culture that had been so eager in prior centuries to adopt Minoan cultural traits. The presence on the tablets of Diktaian Zeus, Potnia of the Labyrinth, and the Sanctuary of Daidalos, show that by this time the Mycenaeans had embedded their own deities into the local places – they had made the landscape their own by having their own gods inhabit those sacred places. The same locations had been sacred to the Minoans for thousands of years, but as the Mycenaeans move in and physically inhabit the landscape, they have their deities move with them so that they too reside in the same landscape. The Mycenaeans have reformulated their mythology to facilitate their changing ontological engagement with their new home – Zeus has not just accompanied them to the new home, rather, he has always been there. Zeus has become, and always was, the deity of that sacred mountain. From the Early to the Late 78

Ibid.: 202–03, 260–62.

79

Ibid.: 256; Gulizio and Nakassis 2014: 120–22.

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LH IIIA period, a span of perhaps sixty years, the Mycenaeans have made the cognitive switch from invoking their mainland deities to identifying them with their new land. The impetus behind this must have been twofold: once their most powerful deities had taken up residence in the sacred landscape, the Mycenaeans would have felt more confident and comfortably at home themselves, and of course it would also have helped to substantiate their political claim to the land as well. And this possession of the land through reimagining the religious landscape did not occur only at Knossos, but also at other locations across Crete and its countryside. As on the mainland, economic resources, such as flocks of sheep and textile workshops, are in some instances recorded as belonging to deities. For instance, Hermes and Potnia (on nine tablets of the KN Dl series) both hold sheep at locations distant from Knossos.80 Thus the Greek deities had taken up residence not only at Knossos but also in sanctuaries founded in several areas on Crete, indicating that the Mycenaeans were not simply a small force limited to Knossos; rather, they had spread out over the Cretan landscape, bringing their deities with them. But of course the deities who resided in the landscape prior to the arrival of the Mycenaeans had a force of their own. The LM IIIA2 tablets reveal that the Mycenaeans were incorporating Minoan deities into their religious observance to a greater degree than they had been inclined to do when they had only recently arrived in what must have been still very much Minoan territory at the time. And as we have seen, it seems likely that the myths associated with the sacred places on Crete made their impression on the Mycenaeans, with the result that as the Mycenaeans came to identify themselves with the local place, the local myths became Mycenaean myths. This combination of responses is paralleled in the visual imagery depicted on the Hagia Triada sarcophagus, which was created in Early LM IIIA2 – a point in time close to that of the later set of Knossos tablets. The scenes painted on this limestone larnax are full of Minoan iconography: the horns of consecration, the double axes with birds perched on top, several of the vessels being used in the ritual (Fig. 3.7). And the form of burial itself, the larnax, is very Minoan, as larnakes are not found on the mainland except in one location, at Tanagra.81 But the imagery also contains elements that are paralleled on the mainland, such as the running spiral, particular types of dress, and the chariots depicted on the short sides.82 Other LM III clay

80 81

Hermes: KN D 411; Killen 1987; Lupack 2006; 2008: 86–102. 82 See Kramer-Hajos 2015 on the larnakes at Tanagra. Burke 2005: 417.

Mycenaean Greek Worship in Minoan Territory

Figure 3.7 The Hagia Triada sarcophagus: (a) side a showing two processions; (b) side b showing the sacrificed bull and a priestess at an altar; (c) the two short sides showing two scenes of chariots driven by women, one drawn by horses or agrimi; (d) the other by gryphons.Courtesy of the Archaeological Museum of Heraklion – Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports – Hellenic Organization of Cultural Resources Development (H.O.C.RE.D.).

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Figure 3.7 (cont.)

larnakes found on Crete, which depict floral, marine, cultic, and occasionally pictorial motifs, have also been shown to involve the ‘exploitation of old motifs and the reconfiguration of certain iconographic subjects’, but none display such elaborate figural scenes that employ both Minoan and Mycenaean iconography in this way.83 The creators of the Hagia Triada sarcophagus were steeped in and addressing the changed socio-political

83

Heywood and Davis 2019: 707.

Mycenaean Greek Worship in Minoan Territory

order through their images painted on the larnax, which, as the centre of a communal funerary ceremony, would have given the family of the deceased an ideal situation in which to proclaim their ideology. The scene depicting the result of the sacrifice with its graphic detail of the dead bull trussed on a table with blood pouring from its slit neck signals the change in ethos that has occurred: in Minoan iconography, the images prioritise the bull-leaping ritual, which may have been the precursor to the sacrifice, but it is an image that is quite different in spirit. The Minoan scene brings out the energy and life force of the bull, indicating the mortal danger that the bull leapers are in. In contrast, the imagery on the Hagia Triada sarcophagus shows that powerful animals’ life force having been successfully vanquished, and thereby it serves to elevate the strength of the mortals. Thus, as Burke points out, the Hagia Triada sarcophagus represents an amalgam of Minoan and Mycenaean cultures: details of the imagery are Minoan, and evoke the native Minoan traditions, but they are combined with elements that are recognisably reflective of mainland Mycenaean culture.84 But the motivation for bringing the two together in such a seamless way is perhaps not simply to act as ‘an ideological tool of a newly installed Mycenaean elite . . . to manage group labor and control access to the benefits of communal activities’.85 Rather, I think that the blend of images expressed the new groups’ view of themselves; this amalgam was inspired by their identity – all of the images, and the Minoan heritage they represented, had become their own at this point. The Hagia Triada sarcophagus, therefore, stands as a visual representation of what has taken place in Mycenaean religion on Crete: the Mycenaeans made the place – Knossos and the rest of Crete – their own, and that involved making their religion at home in the new place as well. This was accomplished through impressing their gods onto the landscape as well as by accepting the power and authority of prominent deities who were already there; both of these reactions constitute responses to the local place. The resulting religious practice is unique in that it does not entirely replicate either of the religions that contributed to it. It has become its own type of worship, encompassing many elements that are familiar from the homeland that the Mycenaeans came from, as well as many that reflect their position in what had been Minoan territory, but which became a reimagined landscape for a new type of people who were no longer simply Mycenaean or Minoan.

84

Burke 2005.

85

Ibid.: 418.

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The experience of the local horizons of the mainland of Greece shaped the indigenous development of a distinct Helladic religion, one which appears to have retained much of its inherent character even as it actively employed the Minoan culture’s iconography to represent itself. When the Mycenaeans actually came to live in Minoan territory, which was likely to have been hostile (or at least not entirely friendly), at first they seem to have held onto the religious traditions that they had brought with them from the mainland. But after a couple of generations, the new locality – the new horizon in which they were making their homes – asserted its force over their cult practice, and I think also over their myth-making, to create something that uniquely reflected the interaction that they had with that particular place. The Helladic foundation remained, but it was built upon by the Cretan deities resident in the landscape, and the result was the idiosyncratic local religion that resurfaces in Greek historical times. Bibliography Aura Jorro, F. (1993) Diccionario Micénico, volume 2. Madrid. (1999) Diccionario Micénico, volume 1. Madrid. Beck, H. (2020) Localism and the Ancient Greek City-State. Chicago, Ill. Bendall, L. M. (2007) Economics of Religion in the Mycenaean World: Resources Dedicated to Religion in the Mycenaean Palace Economy. Oxford. Bennet, J. (1985) ‘The Structure of the Linear B Administration at Knossos’, American Journal of Archaeology 89, 231–49. (2007) ‘Representations of Power in Mycenaean Pylos: Script, Orality, Iconography’, in F. Lang, C. Reinholdt and J. Weilhartner (eds.) Stephanos Aristeios: Archäologische Forschungen zwischen Nil und Istros, Festschrift für Stefan Hiller zum 65. Geburstag. Vienna, 11–22. (2008) ‘Now You See It, Now You Don’t!: The Disappearance of Linear A Script on Crete’, in J. Baines, J. Bennet and S. Houston (eds.) The Disappearance of Writing Systems: Perspectives on Literacy and Communication. London, 1–29. Blackwell, N. G. (2014) ‘Making the Lion Gate Relief at Mycenae: Tool Marks and Foreign Influence’, American Journal of Archaeology 118, 451–88. Blakolmer, F. (2007) ‘The Silver Battle Krater from Shaft Grave IV at Mycenae: Evidence of Fighting “Heroes” on Minoan Palace Walls at Knossos?’, in S. P. Morris and R. Laffineur (eds.) Epos: Reconsidering Greek Epic and Aegean Bronze Age Archaeology. Proceedings of the 11th International Aegean Conference, Los Angeles, UCLA, The J. Paul Getty Villa, 20–23 April 2006. Liège and Austin, Tex., 213–24. (2011) ‘Vom Thronraum in Knossos zum Löwentor von Mykene: Kontinuitäten in Bildkunst und Palastideologie’, in Blakolmer, F. et al. (eds.) Österreichische Forschungen zur Ägäischen Bronzezeit 2009. Vienna, 63–80.

Mycenaean Greek Worship in Minoan Territory (2016) ‘Il Buono, il Bruto, il Cattivo? Character, Symbolism and Hierarchy of Animals and Supernatural Creatures in Minoan and Mycenaean Iconography’, Creta Antica 17, 97–183. (2019) ‘No Kings, No Inscriptions, No Historical Events? Some Thoughts on the Iconography of Rulership in Mycenaean Greece’, in J. M. Kelder and W. J. I. Waal (eds.) From ‘Lugal.gal’ to ‘Wanax’: Kingship and Political Organisation in the Late Bronze Age Aegean. Leiden, 49–94. Boardman J. (1961) The Cretan Collection in Oxford: The Dictaean Cave and Iron Age Crete. Oxford. Brecoulaki, H. et al. (2015) ‘An Unprecedented Naval Scene from Pylos: First Considerations’, in H. Brecoulaki, J. L. Davis and S. R. Stocker (eds.) Mycenaean Wall Painting in Context: New Discoveries, Old Finds Reconsidered. Athens, 257–87. Brumfiel, E. M. (1995) ‘Hetarchy and the Analysis of Complex Societies: Comments’, Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association 6, 125–31. Burke, B. (2005) ‘Materialization of Mycenaean Ideology and the Ayia Triada Sarcophagus’, American Journal of Archaeology 109(3), 403–22. Chadwick, J. (1977) ‘The Ionian Name’, in K. H. Kinzl (ed.) Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean in Ancient History and Prehistory. Berlin, 106–09. Chapin, A. P. (2011) ‘Gender and Coalitional Power in the Miniature Frescoes of Crete and the Cycladic Islands’, in M. Andreadaki-Vlazaki and E. Papadopoulou (eds.) Proceedings of the 10th International Cretological Congress (Khania 2006). Chania, 507–22. (2014) ‘Aegean Painting in the Bronze Age’, in J. J. Pollitt (ed.) The Cambridge History of Painting in the Classical World. Cambridge, 1–65. Cosmopoulos, M. B. (2015) ‘A Group of New Mycenaean Frescoes from Iklaina, Pylos’, in H. Brecoulaki, J. L. Davis and S. R. Stocker (eds.) Mycenaean Wall Painting in Context: New Discoveries, Old Finds Reconsidered. Athens, 245–55. Crowther, C. (2000) ‘Dikte’, in J. A. MacGillivray, J. Driessen and L. H. Sackett (eds.) The Palaikastro Kouros: A Minoan Chryselephantine Statuette and its Aegean Bronze Age Context. Athens, 145–48. Davis, J. L. and J. Bennet (1999) ‘Making Mycenaeans: Warfare, Territorial Expansion, and Representations of the Other in the Pylian Kingdom’, in R. Laffineur (ed.) Polemos: le contexte guerrier en Égée à l’Âge du Bronze. Liège and Austin, Tex., 105–20. Davis, J. L. and S. R. Stocker (2016) ‘The Lord of the Gold Rings: The Griffin Warrior of Pylos’, Hesperia 85(4), 627–55. Driessen, J. (1998–99) ‘Kretes and Iawones: Some Observations on the Identity of Late Bronze Age Knossians’, in J. Bennet and J. Driessen (eds.) A-na-qo-ta: Studies Presented to J.T. Killen. Salamanca, 83–105. (2000) The Scribes of the Room of the Chariot Tablets at Knossos: Interdisciplinary Approach to the Study of a Linear B Deposit. Salamanca.

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  (2003) ‘The Court Compounds of Minoan Crete: Royal Palaces or Ceremonial Centers?’, Athena Review 3, 57–61. (2004) ‘The Central Court of the Palace at Knossos’, in G. Cadogan, E. Hatzaki and A. Vasilakis (eds.) Knossos: Palace, City, State (British School at Athens Studies 12). Athens, 75–82. (2008) ‘Chronology of the Linear B Tablets’, in Y. Duhoux and M. Davies (eds.) A Companion to Linear B: Mycenaean Greek Texts and Their World. Louvain-la-Neuve, 69–79. (2012a) ‘A Matrilocal House Society in Pre- and Protopalatial Crete?’, in I. Schoep, P. Tomkins and J. Driessen (eds.) Back to the Beginning. Reassessing Social and Political Complexity on Crete during the Early and Middle Bronze Age. Oxford, 358–83. (2012b) ‘Chercher la femme: Identifying Minoan Gender Relations in the Built Environment’, in D. Panagiotopoulos and U. Günkel-Maschek (eds.) Minoan Realities: Approaches to Images, Architecture, and Society in the Aegean Bronze Age. Louvain-la-Neuve, 141–63. Driessen, J. and A. Farnoux (1994) ‘Mycenaeans at Malia?’, Aegean Archaeology 1, 54–64. Driessen, J. and H. Fiasse (2011) ‘Burning Down the House: Defining the Household of Quartier Nu at Malia Using GIS’, in K. T. Glowacki and N. Vogeikoff-Brogan (eds.) STEGA: The Archaeology of Houses and Households in Ancient Crete (Hesperia Suppl. 44). Princeton, N.J., 285–96. Driessen, J. and C. Langohr (2007) ‘Rallying around a “Minoan” Past: The Legitimation of Power during the Late Bronze Age’, in W. Parkinson and M. Galaty (eds.) Revisiting Mycenaean Palaces, New Interpretations of an Old Idea II. Los Angeles, Calif., 178–89. (2014) ‘Recent Developments in the Archaeology of Minoan Crete’, Pharos 20, 75–115. Driessen, J. and C. Macdonald (1984) ‘Some Military Aspects in the Late Fifteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries B.C.’, Annual of the British School at Athens 79, 49–74. Egan, E. C. and H. Brecoulaki (2015) ‘Marine Iconography at the Palace of Nestor and the Emblematic Use of the Argonaut’, in H. Brecoulaki, J. L. Davis and S. R. Stocker (eds.) Mycenaean Wall Painting in Context: New Discoveries, Old Finds Reconsidered. Athens, 289–309. Evans, A. (1901) Mycenaean Tree and Pillar Cult and its Mediterranean Relations: With Illustrations from Recent Cretan Finds. London. (1930) The Palace of Minos at Knossos, volume 3. London. Firth, R. J. (2016) ‘Further Statistical Analysis of the Personal Names Used on Crete during the Late Bronze Age’, Minos 39, 379–400. Galanakis, Y., E. Tsitsa and U. Günkel-Maschek (2017) ‘The Power of Images: Re-examining the Wall Paintings from the Throne Room at Knossos’, Annual of the British School at Athens 112, 47–98.

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Galaty, M. (1999) Nestor’s Wine Cups: Investigating Ceramic Manufacture and Exchange in a Late Bronze Age Mycenaean State. Oxford. Gesell, G. (1985) Town, Palace, and House Cult in Minoan Crete. Gothenburg. Goodison, L. (2001) ‘From Tholos Tomb to Throne Room: Perceptions of the Sun in Minoan Ritual’, in R. Laffineur and R. Hägg (eds.) Potnia: Deities and Religion in the Aegean Bronze Age. Liège and Austin, Tex., 77–88. (2004) ‘From Tholos Tomb to Throne Room: Some Considerations of Dawn Light and Directionality in Minoan Buildings’, in G. Cadogan, E. Hatzaki and A. Vasilakis (eds.) Knossos: Palace, City, State (British School at Athens Studies 12). Athens, 339–50. Gulizio, J. (2011) ‘Mycenaean Religion at Knossos’. PhD thesis, University of Texas at Austin. Gulizio, J. and D. Nakassis (2014) ‘The Minoan Goddess(es): Textual Evidence for Minoan Religion’, in D. Nakassis, J. Gulizio and S. James (eds.) Ke-re-me-ja: Studies Presented to Cynthia W. Shelmerdine. Philadelphia, Penn., 115–28. Gulizio, J., K. Pluta and T. G. Palaima (2001) ‘Religion in the Room of the Chariot Tablets’, in R. Hägg and R. Laffineur (eds.) Potnia: Deities and Religion in the Aegean Bronze Age. Proceedings of the 8th International Aegean Conference Göteborg, Göteborg University, 12–15 April 2000. Liège and Austin, Tex., 453–61. Heywood, J. E. and B. Davis. (2019) ‘Painted Larnakes of the Late Minoan III Period: Funerary Iconography and the Stimulation of Memory’, in E. Borgna et al. (eds.) MNEME: 17th International Aegean Conference, Venice and Udine, 17–21 April 2018. Leuven, 703–07. Hogarth D. G. (1899–1900) ‘The Dictaean Cave’, Annual of the British School at Athens 6, 94–116. Killen, J. T. (1987) ‘Piety Begins at Home: Place-Names on Knossos Records of Religious Offerings’, in P. H. Ilievski and I. Crepajac (eds.) Tractata Mycenaea: Proceedings of the Eighth International Colloquium on Mycenaean Studies, Ohrid. Skopje, 163–77. Knappett, C. (2016) ‘Minoanisation and Mycenaeanisation: A Commentary’, in E. Gorogianni, P. Pavuk and L. Girella (eds.) Beyond Thalassocracies: Understanding Processes of Minoanisation and Mycenaeanisation in the Aegean. Oxford, 202–06. Knappett, C. and I. Schoep (2000) ‘Continuity and Change in Minoan Palatial Power’, Antiquity 74, 365–71. Kramer-Hajos, M. (2015) ‘Mourning on the Larnakes at Tanagra: Gender and Agency in Late Bronze Age Greece’, Hesperia 84, 627–67. Kyriakidis, E. (2006) Ritual in the Bronze Age Aegean: The Minoan Peak Sanctuaries. London. Lambrinoudakis, V. (1981) ‘Remains of the Mycenaean Period in the Sanctuary of Apollon Maleatas’, in R. Hagg and N. Marinatos (eds.) Sanctuaries and Cults in the Aegean Bronze Age. Stockholm, 59–65.

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  Lupack, S. (2006) ‘Deities and Religious Personnel as Collectors’, in M. Perna (ed.) Fiscality in Mycenaean and Near Eastern Archives. Naples, 89–108. (2008) The Role of the Religious Sector in the Economy of Late Bronze Age Mycenaean Greece. Oxford. (2010) ‘Mycenaean Religion’, in E. H. Cline (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of the Bronze Age Aegean (ca. 3000–1000 BCE). Oxford, 263–76. (2014) ‘Offerings for the Wanax in the Fr Tablets: Ancestor Worship and the Maintenance of Power in Mycenaean Greece’, in D. Nakassis, J. Gulizio and S. James (eds.) Ke-ra-me-ja: Studies Presented to Cynthia Shelmerdine. Philadelphia, Penn., 163–77. (2016) ‘Pu-ro, Pa-ki-ja-ne, and the Worship of an Ancestral Wanax’, in E. Alram-Stern et al. (eds.) Metaphysis: Ritual, Myth, and Symbolism in the Aegean Bronze Age. Liège and Austin, Tex., 537–41. (2020) ‘Continuity and Change in Cult from the Late Bronze Age to the Early Iron Age’, in G. Middleton (ed.) Collapse and Transformation: The Late Bronze Age/Early Iron in the Aegean. Oxford, 161–67. (2021) ‘The Mycenaeans and Ecstatic Ritual Experience’, in D. L. Stein, S. K. Costello and K. P. Foster (eds.) The Routledge Companion to Ecstatic Experience in the Ancient World. Abingdon, 284–295. MacGillivray, J. A. (2000) ‘The Great Kouros in Cretan Art’, in J. A. MacGillivray, J. Driessen and L. H. Sackett (eds.) The Palaikastro Kouros: A Minoan Chryselephantine Statuette and Its Aegean Bronze Age Context. London, 123–30. MacGillivray, J. A., J. Driessen and L. H. Sackett (eds.) (2000) The Palaikastro Kouros: A Minoan Chryselephantine Statuette and Its Aegean Bronze Age Context. London. Maran, J. (2011) ‘Lost in Translation: The Emergence of Mycenaean Culture as a Phenomenon of Glocalization’, in T. C. Wilkinson, S. Sherratt and J. Bennet (eds.) Interweaving Worlds: Systemic Interactions in Eurasia, 7th to 1st Millennia BC. Oxford, 282–94. Maran, J. and E. Stavrianopoulou (2007) ‘Potnios Aner[Grk] ‒ Reflections on the Ideology of Mycenaean Kingship’, in E. Alram-Stern and G. Nightingale (eds.) Keimelion: The Formation of Elites and Elitist Lifestyles from Mycenaean Palatial Times to the Homeric Period. Akten des internationalen Kongresses vom 3. bis 5. Februar 2005 in Salzburg. Vienna, 285–98. Morris, C. and A. Peatfield (2002) ‘Feeling through the Body: Gesture in Cretan Bronze Age Religion’, in Y. Hamilakis, M. Pluciennik and S. Tarlow (eds.) Thinking through the Body: Archaeologies of Corporeality. New York, N.Y., 105–20. (2021) ‘Bodies in Ecstasy: Shamanic Elements in Minoan Religion’, in D. L. Stein, S. K. Costello and K. P. Foster (eds.) The Routledge Companion to Ecstatic Experience in the Ancient World. Abingdon, 264–283.

Mycenaean Greek Worship in Minoan Territory Morris, S. P. (1989) ‘A Tale of Two Cities: The Miniature Frescoes from Thera and the Origins of Greek Poetry’, American Journal of Archaeology 93, 511–35. Nagy, G. (2015) ‘From Athens to Crete and Back’, in Classical Inquiries: Studies on the Ancient World from the Center for Hellenic Studies. Cambridge, Mass. Available at https://classical-inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/from-athens-tocrete-and-back/#sdfootnote4sym. Nakassis, D., M. L. Galaty and W. A. Parkinson (2010) ‘State and Society’, in E. Cline (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of the Bronze Age Aegean. Oxford, 239–50. Nilsson, M. (1927) The Minoan-Mycenaean Religion and Its Survival in Greek Religion. Lund. Palaima, T. G. (1995) ‘The Nature of the Mycenaean Wanax: Non-Indo-European Origins and Priestly Functions’, in P. Rehak (ed.) The Role of the Ruler in the Prehistoric Aegean. Liège and Austin, Tex., 119–39. (2004) ‘Sacrificial Feasting in the Linear B Documents’, in J. C. Wright (ed.) The Mycenaean Feast. Princeton, N.J., 217–46. (2008) ‘Mycenaean Religion’, in C. W. Shelmerdine (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to the Aegean Bronze Age. Cambridge, 342–61. Peatfield, A. (1994) ‘After the “Big Bang” – What? or Minoan Symbols and Shrines beyond Palatial Collapse’, in S. E. Alcock and R. Osborne (eds.) Placing the Gods: Sanctuaries and Sacred Space in Ancient Greece. Oxford, 19–36. Persson, A. (1942) The Religion of Greece in Prehistoric Times. Berkeley, Calif. Preston, L. (1999) ‘Mortuary Practices and the Negotiation of Social Identities at LM II Knossos’, Annual of the British School at Athens 94, 131–43. (2004) ‘A Mortuary Perspective on Political Changes in Late Minoan II–IIIB Crete’, American Journal of Archaeology 108, 321–48. Rehak, P. (1995) ‘Enthroned Figures in Aegean Art and the Function of the Mycenaean Megaron’, in P. Rehak (ed.) The Role of the Ruler in the Prehistoric Aegean. Liège and Austin, Tex., 95–117. Romano, D. G. and M. E. Voyatzis (2014) ‘Mt Lykaion Excavation and Survey Project, Part 1: The Upper Sanctuary’, Hesperia 83, 569–652. Schoep, I. (2006) ‘Looking beyond the First Palaces’, American Journal of Archaeology 110, 37–64. (2010) ‘The Minoan “Palace-Temple” Reconsidered: A Critical Assessment of the Spatial Concentration of Political, Religious and Economic Power in Bronze Age Crete’, Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 23, 219–43. (2018) ‘Building the Labyrinth: Arthur Evans and the Construction of Minoan Civilization’, American Journal of Archaeology 122, 5–32. Schoep, I. and C. Knappett (2004) ‘Dual Emergence: Evolving Hetarchy, Exploding Hierarchy’, in J. C. Barrett and P. Halstead (eds.) The Emergence of Civilization Revisited. Oxford, 21–37. Shelmerdine, C. W. (1985) The Perfume Industry of Mycenaean Pylos. Gothenburg.

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  (1999) ‘Administration in the Mycenaean Palaces: Where’s the Chief?’, in M. L. Galaty and W. A. Parkinson (eds.) Rethinking Mycenaean Palaces: New Interpretations of an Old Idea. Los Angeles, Calif., 19–24. (2016) ‘Poseidon, Pa-ki-ja-na, and Horse-Taming Nestor’, in E. Alram-Stern et al. (eds.) Metaphysis: Ritual, Myth, and Symbolism in the Aegean Bronze Age. Liège and Austin, Tex., 275–83. Stocker, S. R. and J. L. Davis (2017) ‘The Combat Agate from the Grave of the Griffin Warrior at Pylos’, Hesperia 86(4), 583–605. Thorne, S. (2000) ‘Diktaian Zeus in Later Greek Tradition’, in J. A. MacGillivray, J. Driessen and L. H. Sackett (eds.) The Palaikastro Kouros: A Minoan Chryselephantine Statuette and Its Aegean Bronze Age Context. London, 149–62. Tyree, E. L. (2013) ‘Defining Bronze Age Ritual in Caves in Crete’, in F. Mavridis and J. T. Jensen (eds.) Stable Places and Changing Perceptions: Cave Archaeology in Greece. Oxford, 176–87. Ventris, M. and J. Chadwick (1973) Documents of Mycenaean Greek, second ed. Cambridge. Wace, A. J. B. (1973) ‘Foreword’, in M. Ventris and J. Chadwick (eds.) Documents of Mycenaean Greek. Cambridge, xxi–xxiv. Warren, P. (1979) ‘The Miniature Fresco from the West House at Akrotiri, Thera, and its Aegean Setting’, The Journal of Hellenic Studies 99, 115–29. (1988) Minoan Religion as Ritual Action. Gothenburg. (2001) ‘Review of The Troubled Island: Minoan Crete before and after the Santorini Eruption by Jan Driessen and Colin MacDonald’, American Journal of Archaeology 105, 115–18. Whittaker, H. (2014) Religion and Society in Middle Bronze Age Greece. Cambridge. Wright, J. C. (1987) ‘Death and Power at Mycenae: Changing Symbols in Mortuary Practice’, in R. Laffineur (ed.) Thanatos: les coutumes funèraires en Egèe à l’Age du Bronze. Actes du colloque de Liège, 21–23 avril 1986. Liège and Austin, Tex., 171–84. (1994) ‘The Spatial Configuration of Belief: The Archaeology of Mycenaean Religion’, in S. E. Alcock and R. Osborne (eds.) Placing the Gods: Sanctuaries and Sacred Space in Ancient Greece. Oxford, 37–78. (2004) ‘A Survey of Evidence for Feasting in Mycenaean Society’, in J. C. Wright (ed.) The Mycenaean Feast. Princeton, N.J., 133–78.

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Hera on Samos: Between the Global and the Local  . 

Jan Bremmer’s contribution returns to the thorny issue of divine identities. Bremmer offers a case-study that shows exactly the kind of interplay between local and universal forces that characterises most recent works on localism, religious and otherwise. His study of the presence of the goddess Hera on the Greek island of Samos during the Archaic and Classical periods integrates myth, ritual, and cult, and brings them together in a comprehensive account of the same divine persona. The chapter thus confirms that one and the same divine presence might combine both local and universal elements. Visible throughout, however, is a distinct tendency to localise elements of the divine persona by attributing Hera with particular local connections. Through an erudite study of the larger contexts in which the worship of Hera took place on Samos, Bremmer teases out some of the forces at work in this localising process: among them are the move to integrate aspects of the local landscape or environment into the cultic practice. The result is an invariably rich or thick picture that integrates a number of different perspectives and that can account for the interplay of local and global forces at a certain moment in time and chronologically, as change over time. By suggesting that the overall outlook of a cult could shift by becoming more localised, Bremmer reminds us that the local horizons of ancient Greek religion did not remain static but changed over time. What constitutes the identity of a Greek divinity? The question is not easily answered. There are several aspects that contributed to a recognisable identity. The first was of course the name. Second, there are the myths that relate the various deeds of the deities or put them into relationships with other deities that help to define their sphere of action.1 Third, their cults, not only the rituals connected with them, but also their sacrifices, votives, and the location of their sanctuaries. Fourth, their representations on vase paintings and local coins, and in smaller or bigger sculptures. For comments and information, I am most grateful to the editors, Corinne Bonnet, Bob Fowler, Anja Klöckner, Michael Kerschner, and Andreas Scholl. 1 For the contribution of myth to our knowledge of the nature of divinity, see Buxton 1994: 145–51.

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Together, they must have created the identity of a local divinity.2 However, this way of identifying a divinity was complicated by the system of epithets, the richness of which seems to be a unique feature of Greek religion within the Indo-European tradition, although not compared with the incredible quantity of epithets in the Ancient Near East.3 When talking about Athena Nike and Athena Polias, for example, are we talking about different goddesses or different aspects of the same goddess? Undoubtedly, such epithets often refer to different priesthoods, sacrifices, and locations of worship, yet that does not necessarily exclude that an ancient worshipper, even if only on closer reflection, would have seen an underlying unity in these deities. Despite the self-assured tone Versnel adopts in discussing these questions, one must say that we have surprisingly little evidence to decide this problem: it does not seem to have been a question that bothered the ancient worshipper very much.4 Given the focus of this collection on the local horizons of ancient Greek religion, it will be my aim in this contribution to take a closer look at one local deity: Hera of Samos, in order to see to what extent we can speak of a ‘global’, that is, pan-Hellenic, identity or a local one, or something in between. Ideally, we should discuss the goddess within the context of local Samian religion. From inscriptions we know that, besides Hera, other divinities were also worshipped on Samos, such as Aphrodite, Apollo, Dionysos, Hermes Charidotes, and the Nymphs, as well as heroes, such as Neleus and Deloptes.5 Yet the available literary and epigraphical evidence is too meagre to sketch a satisfactory picture of the whole of Samian religion. Lack of informative sources also prevents us from knowing possible influences from Ionian thinkers and local poets. Pythagoras came from Samos, but we have little idea of his intellectual milieu there, even though his ‘secularising’ approach of religion cries out for a context.6 Samos also claimed a poetic tradition connected with the name of Kreophylos, which may well have helped to shape the myths about Hera, but none of that has survived.7 With the lively international trade in the Archaic and Classical

2 3

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See Bremmer 2021: 15–17. Recently, Graf 2010: 67–74; Hornblower 2014; Parker 2017: 1–32; Bonnet et al. 2018; Langella 2019. Excellent Forschungsgeschichte: Gagné 2021a; see also Gagné 2021b. See Versnel 2011: 517–25; cf. Parker 2011: 91, ‘microanalysis of that kind is often impossible for us’. 6 See Graf 1985: 68. For the intellectual context, see Macris 2018: 784–87. For the evidence, see Nagy 1996: 226–27; cf. Burkert 2001: 138–49; Pòrtulas 2009: 416–21 (‘Els Creofileus, entre Licurg i Pitágoras’).

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periods, though, it would be hard to think of Samos as an intellectual or poetic enclave outside contemporary philosophical and theological developments, but that is all we can say. Thus we will concentrate on Hera alone. Admittedly, in recent decades the goddess has not enjoyed that much attention.8 That is why a study focusing on one local cult may well help to enrich our general understanding of the goddess, whose temple dominated cult on Samos.9 As the few discursive passages about Hera’s cult concern festivals that go back to the Classical and Archaic periods, if not earlier, I will limit myself mainly to those periods, for which we also have the most striking votives. The continuing publication of the excavations of the German Archaeological Institute in their series Samos since 1961 and the more recent edition of the inscriptions of Samos enable us to gain a better view of the cult than was possible in the past.10 To that end, I will look at Hera’s name, her local myths, her rituals, Toneia and Heraia, and her sanctuary and cult in general. I will end with some conclusions and more general considerations.

The Name The name Hera of the Samian goddess is an old one and already attested in Thebes and Pylos in Mycenaean times, when she is the partner of Zeus with whom she has a son called Drimios.11 Unfortunately, etymologists have not yet agreed upon the original meaning of her name, even though ‘(she) who is in the flower of her youth’ seems to have certain plausibility.12 It is noteworthy that, unlike in some other places, Hera did not have any local epithets on Samos, as far as our evidence goes: there was only one Hera on Samos, who was originally not paired in worship with Zeus, like at so many other places.13 This situation would last until later Hellenistic times and even then only change on small altars that were

8

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10 13

But see de la Genière 1997; Bremmer 2005; especially, Pirenne-Delforge and Pironti 2016. For a good survey of older research with unpersuasive new solutions, see Kipp 1974. Curiously, this was not reflected in the onomastic evidence; see Curbera 2004: 3, who intriguingly notes: ‘names alluding to Hera, the main deity of the island (only 45 exx.), are far behind Zeus (145), Apollo (122), Dionysos (80), Demeter (69) and Artemis (50), but ahead of Hermes (43), Athena (34), the Meter (34), and Men (30).’ 11 12 Hallof 2000–03. TH Of 28; PY Tn 316; see Palaima 1999. García Ramón 2016. See Pirenne-Delforge and Pironti 2009; see also the list in Farnell 1896: 241–42.

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probably used in a domestic cult.14 Admittedly, later authors may refer to her as ‘Samian Hera’, but that is mostly done by outsiders.15 For the Samians themselves, there was just the one and only Hera – at least until the Imperial age. It is only then that we hear of Hera Samia and Hera Archegetis, but not before that time.16 It seems clear that cult activities took place in the area of her sanctuary in late Mycenaean times.17 However, when exactly the Samians started to worship a goddess they called Hera is impossible to say.

The Myths There were several local myths connected with Hera. Somewhat arbitrarily, I will discuss them by starting with her birth. Pausanias relates that ‘the Samians themselves believe that the goddess was born on the island near the river Imbrasos, that is, under the lygos [“chaste tree, monk’s pepper”] that still grows in the Heraion in my day’.18 The notice has not really received the interest it deserves in recent discussions, and it pays to take a closer look at the passage. Let us first observe that the tradition of the local birth predates Pausanias. The local historian Leon, who lived in the middle of the second century BC, calls the goddess ‘autochthonous’, which suggests claims to a local birth, but we can go back further in time, as Apollonius Rhodius calls her ‘Imbrasia Hera’, an epithet quoted by Nikander in his Alexipharmaka.19 The tradition of her birth near the river Imbrasos, then, reached well into the beginning of the Hellenistic era, if not earlier. At the same time, we should see the description as a rather generous one. Although the original place of the lygos tree is debated, no modern scholar situates it very close to the banks of the river Imbrasos, although some of

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IG XII.6, 1.530 with Hallof ad loc., 1.533; for a possibly obscene painting of Zeus and Hera ascribed to the Heraion, see Schiebe 2012. Aethlius FGrH/BNJ 536 F3 = F 3 Fowler; Callim. F 101 and 167 Pfeiffer/Harder; Menodotus FGrH 541 F 2 (book meant for non-Samians); Paus. 5.13.8; Malchus F 7a Cresci; schol. Pind. Ol. 6.149b. Samia: IG XII 6, 2.570 (under Trajan). Archegetis: IG XII.6, 2.581; SEG 51.1087 (ca. AD 307–11). Walter, Clemente and Niemeier 2019: 6–7. But the region was already settled in the Early Bronze Age; see Menelaou 2015; Menelaou and Day 2020. Paus. 7.4.4. Ap. Rhod. 1.187; Nic, Alex. 619; IG XII 6, 1.285 = Leon FGrH 540 T1 with Jacoby ad loc., Dillery 2005: 512–13; but also note the epithet Imbrasia for Artemis in Callim. Hymn 3, 228.

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the tree’s varieties like to grow near streams.20 Apparently, the description is a bird’s eye view of the topographical situation. There are two conflicting traditions about the river. One says that it used to be called Parthenios but now Imbrasos, and the other states the reverse. According to Kallimachos, ‘you used to be called Imbrasos instead of Parthenios’, but his contemporary Euphorion states ‘and as for the river now called Imbrasos, they (the Leleges) named it Parthenios’.21 The names of the river are derived from different languages: Parthenios is obviously Greek and connected to parthenos, just as Samos itself was supposed to be once called Parthenia or Parthenis.22 Imbrasos was also the name of one of the Kabeiroi on Imbros, which points to influence from Karia and Lykia, where places and names with the element Imbr- are well attested, probably going back to a Cuneiform Luwian word meaning ‘open country’.23 This suggests that Imbrasos was the original name, as the terms relating to virginity are typically Greek and were probably introduced in connection with the cult of Hera. Consequently, Anatolian influence is not implausible in matters of myth and ritual. There is, however, a problem. An inscription from the second century BCE runs as follows: ‘Holy Imbrasos, Holy Parthenie, Holy Parthenios’.24 The votive shows that the river Imbrasos was worshipped as a god, just like many other rivers in the Greek world, and it distinguishes between Imbrasos and Parthenios, who is also invoked as a god.25 Excavations have shown that there was more than one branch of the Imbrasos, which may have led to a differentiation in name, although combined into one river by people outside Samos: Imbrasos, also called Parthenios.26 Imbrasos is indeed the name of a river god resting on a cornucopia and holding a reed on Samian coinage from the Roman period.27

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24 26

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For its probable location, see Walter, Clemente and Niemeier 2019: 17–24; cf. Hobbs 1991. Callim. F 599 Pfeiffer; (F 110 Lightfoot, Loeb); Similarly, schol. Pind. Ol. 6.149. For Kallimachos’ interest in Samos and the cult of Hera, see Pasquali 2014: 56–76. Similarly, Strabo 10.2.17. Parthenia: Arist. F 377 Rose = Heraclides Lembus, Pol. 30 Dilts; Callim. Hymn 4, 49; Varro apud Lact. Inst. Div. 1.17.8; Strabo 10.2.17, 14.1.15; Hyg. Fab. 14.16; Hdn. Prosod., p. 297, 33 Lentz; Steph. Byz. σ 42 Billerbeck; schol. Ap. Rhod. 2.865–72; schol. Dionys. Per. 534. Parthenis: Euphorion F 109 Lightfoot; Cirio 1981. Schürr 1991–93; 2001: 104–05; Adiego 2007: 335. For Imbros, Imbriades and related names in Karia and Lykia, see Balzat et al. 2013: 213. 25 IG XII 6, 2.594. Bremmer 2019a. Buschor 1953a; Walter, Clemente and Niemeier 2019: 104–05; note also the river Parthenios in Hdt. 2.104.3. Compare the two rivers or river arms at Ephesos surrounding Artemis’ temenos: Plin. HN 5, 31: et templum Dianae conplexi e diversis regionibus duo Selinuntes. Head and Poole 1892: 373, 375, 378, 383, 384, 390 and 395.

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By relating that the Leleges called the river Parthenios, the Samians put the name Parthenios into a kind of Urzeit, when the Leleges were still around, since later generations had realised that they no longer existed. As Robert Fowler has conclusively shown: ‘Like the Pelasgians, the Leleges are a convenient name for pre-Hellenic inhabitants of one kind or another, perhaps originating in some firm historical context, but one which is no longer recoverable.’28 It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the Hadrianic poet geographer Dionysios, when mentioning Samos, calls the goddess ‘Pelasgian Hera’ in his description of the then known world.29 We do not hear anything about the youth of Hera, only that she grew up on Samos, where she was initiated into sex by Zeus.30 The scholia on Homer tell that Zeus secretly deflowered Hera without the knowledge of her parents, with the latter detail already figuring in Homer.31 It must have been a well-known episode in the life of these two gods, as it is often alluded to by later poets, such as Kallimachos, Theocritus, Plautus, and Nonnos, but also by Plato, Aristokles and the scholar Apollodoros.32 The Altmeister Martin Nilsson (1874–1967) connected the episode with the custom of Kiltgang (‘nightcourting’), but that custom seems to have been unknown in ancient Greece.33 In the end, the meaning of the motif is lost in the obscurity of the Dark Ages. In any case, the derivation from Homer or other poets is obvious, as Zeus plays no role in the cult of Hera at Samos. The scholia also relate that this myth was associated with a Samian wedding custom. When wanting to get married, the men first bring the girls together in secret, but openly perform the weddings with sacrifices. The scarce information suggests that the Samians would gather the girls together in a sanctuary, perhaps in that of Hera, at a secret place. Similarly, many girls’ choruses met before marriage in sanctuaries of Artemis, which were often situated in marshy countryside, whose lush vegetation fitted the 28 29

30 31 32

33

Fowler 2000–13: 2.98. Dionysios 534. For the Pelasgians, who are comparable to the Leleges in their ‘pre-historic’ status, see Fowler 2003. Varro apud Lactant. Div. inst. 1.17.8; schol. Dionys. Per. 534. Hom. Il. 14.294–96; schol. and Eust. on Il. 14.296. Callim. F 48 Pfeiffer/Harder; Harder, ad loc., rightly doubts the connection made by Kallimachos (F 74.4 Pfeiffer/Harder) with a Naxian fertility ritual, although this was said by schol. Il. 14.296; Gernet 1968: 40, n. 109; Theocritus 15.64; Plaut. Trin. 207–08; Nonnus, Dion. 41.322–25; Pl. Resp. 390b; Aristokles (FGrH/BNJ 33 F 3 with Fowler ad loc. = Aristokles FGrH 451 F1); Apollod. FGrH 244 F119; Walter 1976: 22; fig. 8 also interprets a small wooden statuette of the late seventh century BCE showing a couple in a gesture of sexual approach as Zeus and Hera, but its unique character makes the interpretation doubtful. Nilsson 1906: 47, 53; followed by Gernet 1968: 40, n. 108. For the custom, see Wikman 1937; Junod 1946; Shorter 1976: 128–29.

Hera on Samos

beauty of the female adolescents.34 After this period of segregation, the Samian girls would return into the civilised world and perform their wedding with sacrifices: evidently, they got married en masse at the end of their stay in the wild.35 Such collective weddings are also attested for Crete and for the Troad, as appears from a scurrilous anecdote about the river god Scamander with a mention of a procession of newlyweds, which, taken together, points to an Archaic background for this ritual.36 Not surprisingly, Varro mentions that Hera also got married in Samos and that her wedding was celebrated every year.37 There are indeed a few Greek festivals called Theogamia or Hieros Gamos, but we have hardly any information in what context these took place, except that in Athens the ‘Sacred Marriage’ was celebrated in the wedding month Gamelion.38 With her wedding, we have come to the end of Hera’s personal myth on Samos. However, her statue plays a role in another myth as well, but in a myth closely interrelated with a ritual, its most important source. So, let us turn to Samian rituals connected with Hera.

The Toneia There were at least three Samian rituals for Hera: the just-discussed rites connected with her wedding, the Toneia and the Heraia. The last two have often been conflated, albeit wrongly, as we will see. We begin with a closer look at the Toneia. Several scholars call it Tonaia, which, however, is a modern emendation; the manuscript tradition gives Toneia, which should be kept in the text, as was already seen by Wilamowitz.39

34 35

36

37 38 39

Cole 2004: 178–97; Calame 2019: 174–90, 254–302. Cf. schol. Il. 14.296a: ὅθεν Σάμιοι ζήλῳ τῆς θεοῦ μνηστεύοντες τὰς κόρας λάθρᾳ συγκοιμίζουσιν, εἶτα παρρησίᾳ τοὺς γάμους θύουσιν. For the latter expression meaning the celebration of marriage, cf. Chariton 2.4.5, 4.3.10; Ach. Tat. 1.13.5, 8.19.3; Longus 3.32.3. Strabo 10.4.20; Scamander: Ps.-Aeschin., Ep. 10.3–5, cf. Puiggali 2003; Nollé 2009: 45–46 Background: schol. Eur. Phoen. 347; Currie 2002: 31–33. Collective weddings: see the suggestive observations of Gernet 1968: 39–45, 203. Varro apud Lact. Inst. Div. 1.17.8. Avagianou 1991; Parker 2011: 195–96; 2005: 160, 207, 441. Parker 2011: 172–73, 193–95; Sourvinou-Inwood 2011: 185; Pirenne-Delforge and Pironti 2016: 145–55. Toneia is kept by Graf 1985: 94; Nafissi 1983; Bettinetti 2002: 108–16; and Casadio 2004. Toneia has been restored in the most recent edition of Athenaios: Olson 2019. Also von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff 1937 (originally 1895): 24, n. 4; id. apud Hiller von Gaertringen 1906: 310 (Addendum to no. 57.6), but the name Toneia has disappeared in the recent re-edition of this inscription: Blümel and Merkelbach 2014: 1.286 no. 116.

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The most striking aspect of the ritual seems to have been the tightly (syntonōs) tying up of the statue with the lygos, as that has given the festival its name. But why the lygos? Hera was not the only divinity to be tied up with this plant. In the myth of Dionysos’ kidnapping by pirates the god is bound with twigs of the lygos, as was Hermes by Apollo.40 In Sparta, Artemis was worshipped under the epithet Lygodesma, or ‘chaste-tree bound’, because her statue was reputed to have been found in a thicket of the chaste-tree, which also supported her statue.41 Evidently, the lygos or agnus castus was very suitable for this purpose and therefore often identified with the willow, although the latter belongs to a different botanical family.42 There is more to be said about the place of the lygos in the festival, but let us first look at our sources. The starting place of any study of the festival must be the local historian, Menodotus, and his lost treatise A List of the Notable Objects on Samos.43 Naturally, we cannot but make use of Menodotus, but we should keep in mind that the, probably, slightly older historian Phylarchus provided some different details, which, unfortunately, have not been handed down.44 This is the more regrettable, as Phylarchus derived part of his material from another Samian historian, Douris (ca. 350–after 280 BCE), whom we will meet again later. In any case, it is important to remember that stories like the following may have been varied by the different authors telling them. So what did Menodotus relate? According to Athenaios, He says that when Eurystheus’ daughter Admete, who had fled from Argos, arrived on Samos, she had a vision of Hera and wanted to make a thank-offering in return for her safe escape from home, and she therefore took charge of the temple that exists even today, but was originally founded by the Leleges and the Nymphs.45

The story starts with the escape of Admete from Argos. Being the daughter of the king of Argos, Eurystheus, and presumably not having a husband, she is represented as an adolescent. And indeed, her name literally means

40 41

42

43

44

Hom. Hymn Dion. 7; Hom. Hymn Herm. 410. Paus. 3.16.9; Radermacher 1931: 145–46, already connected the binding of Hermes with Hera of Samos and Artemis Lygodesma. Bernsdorff 2020: 2.414 (on F 352) compares the verb λυγίζειν‚ ‘bend’, e.g. Soph. Ichn. 362 Radt; Longus 1.5.1; Aesch. F 235 Radt (= Ath. 14.674E, 672E–F): the aition according to which garlands are a substitute for Prometheus’ chains; cf. Brelich 1970; Fowler 2017: 9–10. I have freely used here my discussion of the lygos in Bremmer 2008a: 186–88; add Borengässer 2004. FGrH 541 F1: ca. 200 BCE; Ath. 5. 671E–674A: ca. CE 200; cf. Jacoby on Menodotus FGrH 541 F2; Dillery 2005: 511–14; Thomas 2019: 306–17. 45 FGrH 81 F 14. Ath. 15.672AB.

Hera on Samos

‘unbroken, unwedded’, and was used to denote a girl from Homer onwards.46 Having arrived in Samos, she apparently became the priestess of the existing temple. Such adolescent priestesses were typical of the last stage of adolescence, as many parallels abundantly demonstrate. In this case, it suggests a connection with coming-of-age rituals and marriage as the final destination of the maiden.47 Unfortunately, we have no other literary evidence for adolescent maidens on Samos, except for the prenuptial ritual, but a series of dolls with movable arms found in the Heraion have been plausibly connected to coming-of-age rituals.48 The temple itself is described as having been founded by the Leleges and the Nymphs. The mention of the latter has been questioned, and the text at this point is not universally accepted, but there seems no decisive reason to doubt the reading, as Anakreon calls Samos the ‘city of the Nymphs’.49 Nymphs with their connection to both adolescence and rustic landscapes would fit the role of Hera in this case, and the Leleges guaranteed that the temple was of primeval antiquity, even older than the one of Argos that Admete had left behind!50 The story continues by telling that: The Argives heard about this and, being angered, they promised money to the Etruscans, who lived off piracy, and convinced them to steal the statue, since the Argives were convinced that if this happened, the inhabitants of Samos would certainly punish Admete. The Etruscans entered Hera’s port . . . quickly picked up the statue . . . and pulled up their anchors. They began to row as hard as they could – but were unable to leave.51

The mention of the statue is very interesting, as it implies that it was portable. Such a statue – in this case of Artemis – is also known from the myth of Iphigeneia and Orestes, which may have had an influence here.52 There is also an alternative tradition that the statue had been brought by the Argonauts, but in both cases the statue comes from afar.53 The two

46

47 48 49

50 52

53

See Faulkner 2008: 82, 133. For the initiatory background of the expression, see Calame 2019: 407–15. Cole 2004: 132; Bremmer 2008b: 42–47; Leventis 2019: 72–74. Leyenaar-Plaisier 1979: 121–26, nos. 247–56; Furtwängler 1997: 147. Anac. F 448 Page/Bernsdorff; Samian Nymphs: Nic. Alex. 151 (Chesian Nymphs on Samos); the altar for Apollo Nymphegetas (also IG XII 6, 1.528) and the Nymphs (IG XII 6, 1.527); Sourvinou-Inwood 2005: 116. 51 Cf. Larson 2001: 91–120. Ath. 15.572BC. For images of Artemis connected with Orestes, see Graf 1979 (fundamental); Pritchett 1998: 256–60; Bilde 2003; Burrell 2005. Paus. 7.4.4.

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traditions may even be compatible if the Argonaut was Ancaeus, who was easily confused with the Lelex king Ancaeus. Apollonius Rhodius has two Ancaei, both Argonauts, and Menodotus, roughly contemporary with Apollonius, may have thought so too.54 The latter, or his sources, made the Lelex Ancaeus founder of the sanctuary (and Apollonius Rhodius’ phrasing is suggestive in this regard), and agreed that he was also an Argonaut; in that way, he is compatible with Pausanias.55 It is obvious that the statue had miraculous powers, as the Etruscan pirates were stopped in their tracks when trying to kidnap it. Such a miracle of people frozen on the spot is typical of later Christian hagiography and seemingly unique at this time.56 So how does the story develop? Thinking therefore that a god was involved somehow, they carried the statue (bretas) out of the ship again and put it on the shore; after setting barley cakes (psaista) beside it, they left, terrified. At dawn, Admete made known that the statue had disappeared, and a search was mounted, the seekers found it on the beach. As one would expect from barbarians, however, the Karians imagined that it had run off on its own accord. So they fastened it to a mat made of willow (lygos) branches, pulled the longest branches on both sides of it, and so wrapped it from every side. After Admete had untied it, she purified it and set it once again on its base, just as it had stood previously.57

The pirates are of course frightened and deposit the bretas, ‘statuette’, on the shore, together with a sacrifice of barley cakes.58 Sacrifices of cakes were normal in Greek religion, but barley cakes were the very cheapest of them.59 Having discovered the theft, a search found the statue on the beach where suddenly, rather surprisingly, Karians appear, who had not been mentioned before, perhaps an indication that Athenaios has abbreviated his source text. The Karians are seen as the Samian Urvolk, and we may even wonder to what extent the combination of Karians and Leleges is not a regional feature, as the fifth-century mythographer Pherekydes mentions that Greek colonists forcibly removed the Karians and Leleges from Samos

54 55

56 58

59

See Ap. Rhod. Argon. 1.188 for the Samian. For this Ancaeus, see Pasquali 2014: 48–49; also, as suggested by Bob Fowler (pers. comm. via email, 18 June 2020). 57 Cf. Festugière 1972: 294–96. Ath. 15.672CD. The Greek term is used especially in epic and tragedy, cf. Donohue 1988: 25–26. Its use here may point to a poetic source for Menodotus. Kearns 1994; 2011; García Soler 2014; Antiphanes F 203.4 and Adespota F 820 Kassel/Austin.

Hera on Samos

and Ephesos.60 In any case, the Karians appear also in a Hellenistic epigram of the local poet Nikainetos who calls the lygos (see below) ‘the ancient wreath of the Karians’: I do not wish, o Philotheros, to dine in the city, but near Hera, enjoying the breezes of the West Wind. Sufficient for me is a simple pallet on the ground beneath my ribs, a bed close beside a willowy bush growing on the spot and a chaste-tree (lygos), the ancient Karians’ wreath. Come, let wine be brought and the Muses’ charming lyre that, drinking to our hearts’ delight, we may sing of the famous spouse (nymphēn) of Zeus, the Mistress of our island.61

The Karians fastened the statue to a mat, which Admete unfastened. She purified it, presumably, from the unholy hands of the pirates and Karians, and put it back on its base.62 It is noteworthy that in the myth it is a female who washes Hera, as that seems to have been the case elsewhere too.63 With the return of the statue on its base, we hear no more about the myth, but we are informed about the corresponding ritual: ‘That is why, ever since, every year the statue is taken out of the temple to the beach, where it is purified and barley cakes set besides it. The festival is called the Toneia, because the statue was tightly wrapped by the men who searched for it originally.’64 However, the ritual was not yet the end of the story: the Karians, thus presumably still Menodotus, consulted Apollo about what had happened. The god prescribed them to wear garlands made of lygos, that is, from the same shrub with which they had fastened the statue. Moreover, they should remove all garlands, except those of laurel, which were reserved for the worshippers of Hera only. ‘And so, the Karians, who wanted to obey the

60

61

62

63

Pherekydes FGrH 3 F 155 = F 155 Fowler (= Strabo 14.1.3). For Karians and Leleges as primaeval people, see also Sourvinou-Inwood 2005: 268–75; Fowler 2018; in general, Kern and Krüger 2019. Ath. 15.673B = HE 2703–10 Gow/Page. Pirenne-Delforge and Pironti 2016: 149 translate nymphēn with ‘young bride’, but the bridal state is not thematised here and it seems better with Gow/Page to translate as ‘spouse’; see also Rutherford 2001: 403–04, with more examples of nymphē meaning ‘wife’. Cf. Bob Fowler (pers. comm., email 18 June 2020): ‘“mat” is a bit confusing (normally something flat on the ground) but so is the Greek. The word is thōrakion, i.e. breastplate, and the verb is apereisasthai; so I think it means the statue was leaned up against a head-to-toe sized mat, which was then pulled around the statue like a breastplate and secured with the lygos branches.’ 64 Hölscher 2017: 137. Ath. 15.672DE.

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orders of the oracle, abandoned their previous kinds of garlands but by and large used the lygos, although they allowed the goddess’ servants to wear the garlands of laurel, which remain in use even today.’65 With this oracular intervention, the description of the myth and ritual by Menodotus has come to an end. However, we have another, earlier testimony about the festival, which is usually neglected.66 Just after the middle of the second century CE, Polyainos, a Macedonian, composed a work on military tactics called Stratagems, a collection of clever strategic and tactical military exploits, which he derived from earlier collections, although often without any indication of his source. One of these concerns the Samian tyrant Syloson, about whose coup d’état Polyainos tells the following anecdote: Syloson, son of Kalliteles, who was deemed by the Samians to be on the people’s side, was elected their general. When they were at war with the Aeolians and did not intend to celebrate the festival in the temple of Hera, which is a short distance from the city, Syloson said that being a general he could not neglect his religious duty towards the goddess. He would instil more fear into his enemies if he celebrated the festival inherited from their fathers. The Samians applauded his piety and courage, went to the Sanctuary of Hera, built their huts, and prepared everything for the festival. But Syloson entered the city by night, called in the sailors from the triremes and seized control of Samos.67

The Syloson of this anecdote cannot be exactly dated but we cannot go far wrong when we situate him in the sixth century BCE, probably before Polykrates came to power and perhaps family of him, as the latter also had a brother Syloson.68 It is of importance as it gives a rare picture of the actual preparations for the festival, actually of any Greek festival. With these texts we have exhausted our sources. When we compare the myth and the ritual, we note a striking difference between the two: the ritual as described by Menodotus does not mention the search of the statue, which only occurs in the myth. Nevertheless, since Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker (1784–1868), scholars have speculated about a search ritual.69 We have to be careful, though, not to conflate the myth and ritual of a specific festival. Both media have different contents and do not

65 67 69

66 Ath. 15.673AB. But not by Kron 1988: 142; note also Burkert 2012: 43. 68 Polyaenus, Strat. 6.45. Hdt. 3.39, 139–41 etc.; Polyaenus, Strat. 1.23. Welcker 1867: 17–18; for example, Nilsson 1906: 48; Burkert 1979: 129; Sourvinou-Inwood 2011: 185; but note the reticence of Graf 1985: 95, n. 133.

Hera on Samos

necessarily reflect one another on a one-to-one basis.70 In this case, the absence of the statue from the temple is dramatised in the myth as a theft with a happy ending, but the ritual could suffice with a procession bringing the statue out of the temple and returning it back again after washing and dressing. The lack of data makes it impossible to give a thick description of the ritual, but the main lines seem clear. Evidently, there was a preparation of the festival before the actual day of celebration, as we can deduce from Polyainos. People came up from the city and built huts in the sanctuary, perhaps as close to the beach as possible. Such huts were normal for festivals that lasted more than one day, and we hear of them in the case of the Olympic Games, the Athenian Thesmophoria, the Spartan Hyacinthia and Karneia, and the Mysteries of Andania.71 According to Nilsson, these huts were typical for agrarian festivals, but their occurrence at the Thesmophoria, Toneia, and Andanian Mysteries shows that this is much too limited an interpretation.72 In any case, on Samos the prominence of the lygos suggests that the huts were constructed from branches of that willowy bush. Early in the morning, given that Admete discovers the theft at dawn, the worshippers would leave the sanctuary in procession with the statue of Hera and go to the sea. There was no animal sacrifice, as the goddess received only barley cakes. Indeed, it seems unlikely that the worshippers would have had a gourmet meal with the goddess getting this poor offering. I therefore take it that the worshippers will have had a simple meal as well. Moreover, they will have been wreathed with garlands of lygos (above), thus signifying the opposition to the normal garlands of laurel, and have been reclining on beds of twigs, as is also mentioned in the epigram by Nicaenetus.73 The nature of the lygos tree intrigued Athenaios and scholars before him, as the lygos wreath was repeatedly discussed. From our evidence, we can see that the lygos was a kind of arbor infelix.74 Homer already calls it ‘fruitdestroying’, since it was thought to lose its fruit before ripening.75 During the Thesmophoria, the Athenian women slept on twigs of the lygos because 70 71

72 74

75

Cf. Bremmer 2019b: 427–45. Ael. VH 4.9; Ar. Thesm. 624, 685; Ath. 4.138F; Demetrios of Scepsis apud Ath. 4.141E; CGRN 222 A38. 73 Nilsson 1906: 123. Contra Sourvinou-Inwood 2011: 186. See, especially, von Staden 1992, overlooked by Borengässer 1998. Note also its use in modern medicine: Schellenberg 2001. Hom. Od. 15.510.

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the plant was thought to promote infertility.76 Pliny, too, mentions the plant as a means to induce infertility.77 For early Christian writers the tree had even become the symbol of chastity.78 We probably have a testimony of this ‘a-sexual’ meaning of the lygos in a poem by Anakreon, of which two lines have survived: Μεγιστῆς δ’ ὁ ϕιλόϕρων δέκα δὴ μῆνες ἐπεί τε στεϕανοῦταί τε λύγῳ καὶ τρύγα πίνει μελιηδέα. Now it is ten months that the friendly Megistes has garlanded himself with chaste-tree and drunk honey-sweet must.79

Unfortunately, we do not know who this Megistes was; nor do we know when exactly Anakreon wrote this poem, but it could conceivably have been composed when he was staying at the court of Polykrates, that is, in the years around 530 BCE. In any case, the lines refer to the symposium ex negativo as Megistes lacks sex and wine, two of its most important aspects.80 At the same time, the garland of lygos is in opposition to the one of the laurel. Although it is not really clear who has to wear the latter garland at which time, the role of the lygos is very important in the festival: Hera was born, as we have seen, near a lygos, Pausanias mentions that the lygos in Hera’s sanctuary was believed to be the oldest living tree in the world, and the lygos plays a prominent role in the myth about Hera’s statue.81 Yet in the ritual the lygos is not mentioned other than that the Karians had to wear garlands of lygos. For one day, then, the participants in the festival were like the mythical Karians. At some point during the day, the statue was bathed in the sea, which was a fairly normal manner of purification of statues.82 Afterwards it will have received new, clean clothes, and returned to its sanctuary, presumably in a festal procession. A Samian inscription mentions many clothes of Hera, and we can only guess with which of these she was newly dressed.83 During the festival, the Samians will have had a good time, although we do not know in what manner. At the end of the day, or perhaps the next day, they will have returned to their homes. 76 77 79 80 82 83

Thesmophoria: Bremmer 2014: 170–77 (with earlier bibliography); Ruscillo 2013; Patera 2020. 78 Plin. HN 16.26.110. Rahner 1945: 361–413; Bambeck 1978. Anac. F 352 Page, tr. Bernsdorff. 81 Cf. Bernsdorff 2020: 2.410–17 for a detailed discussion of these lines. Paus. 8.23.5. Parker 1983: 226–27; Sourvinou-Inwood 2011: 163. IG XII 6, 1.261.12–31; cf. Ferrara 2017: 118, whose translation has to be corrected in the light of the German translation by Klaus Hallof (http://pom.bbaw.de/ig/IG%20XII%206,%201,%20261, accessed 10 June 2020).

Hera on Samos

What do we make of the ritual? In the last half century we have had three analyses that went deeper than statements that just claimed a background in magic and fertility or a Reinigungsfest.84 To start with, Walter Burkert paid attention to the ritual of the Samian Hera in his Sather lectures, which first showed his turn to an interest in the connections between Greece and the Orient.85 According to him, the Samians got the image of the Hera out by night, ‘found’ it in the morning, and brought it back to the lygos, performing the festival wreathed with lygos branches, reclining on lygos twigs and feasting on the animals sacrificed at the great altar. Burkert paid special attention to the statue. Following the ancient evidence that Hera’s statue originally had been an unwrought plank until it was put into shape by the sculptor Smilis (literally ‘Carver’).86 Burkert connected the ritual with the Anatolian myth of Telepinu and the ritual around the Hittite eian tree, concluding, in a very Burkertian manner, with all kinds of references to hunting rituals, that the return of the goddess signified the return of prosperity. In itself, Burkert’s analysis would not be impossible: Samos is situated less than 1.5 km from Anatolia and thus within the Anatolian contact zone, as is also clear from the Anatolian features of the cult statue and its resemblance to that of the Ephesian Artemis, the Late Hittite features of a wonderful shallow stone basin for sprinkling water on worshippers, and the many Anatolian votives.87 The holy trees we know – Pausanias mentions the ones of Dodona, Delos, the Athenian Acropolis and the Heraion of Samos, to which should be added those in the sanctuaries of Artemis– always are the centre of Archaic sanctuaries, and the lygos may well have played a role in a ritual, but we have no further information about its role.88 Yet there can be little doubt that Burkert’s focus on the tree is misguided, as nothing in the myth or ritual connects the statue of Hera with the arrival of prosperity. We also have no information that the statue was connected with the lygos tree in the sanctuary. Burkert was probably influenced by the discovery of a piece of wood in 1963 that was declared to be the trunk of the famous lygos tree, but later research has shown that it was a trunk cut

84 86

87

88

85 As done by Kron 1998: 138; Hölscher 2017: 424, respectively. Burkert 1979: 129–38. See Harder on Callim. F 100.1 for Kallimachos’ play with this meaning of Smilis. Some scholars think that the statue was anthropomorphic from the very beginning; see Romano 1988: 250–54; Hölscher 2017: 409–24; but see also Kannsteiner et al. 2014: 1.161–70, nos. 241–50. For a detailed discussion of the cult statue and its Anatolian origin, see Fleischer 1973: 202–23; Burkert 1979: 129–38; 2011: 71–72, 149. See, with a nice photo, Scholl 2020: 44–46. Also, Ebbinghaus 2006; Kyrieleis 2020: 24–25, 35–43. Paus. 8.23.5; cf. Kerschner 2015: 204–11.

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around 680/670 BCE from a juniper rather than a tree that had grown at this spot.89 The connection with the Telepinu myth seems more promising at first sight, but closer inspection leaves few persuasive parallels except, perhaps, the general theme of the search.90 In the end, Burkert’s discussion is not convincing, because it does not account for all the details. I will therefore follow the analyses of Fritz Graf and Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood, who have pointed to a number of details that together suggest seeing the ritual as a kind of ritual of reversal, with elements of abnormality and primordiality.91 In other words, in many ways the myth and ritual of the Toneia imagine and perform a reversal of normality, even if in accordance with the differences between these media. The features of primordiality are obvious in the myth and the ‘prehistory’ of the statue. The Karians, whose wreath the worshippers wore, were no longer present on Samos. As regards the statue, in one version of the myth it originally was just a plank, a piece of unworked wood, which only received an anthropomorphic form under Prokles, one of the founders of Greek Samos; clearly, its making was situated chronologically at the time of the transition from non-Greek to Greek culture.92 Its distant origin, being brought from Argos or by the Argonauts, points to a particular type of statue which has been well investigated by Fritz Graf, who has identified a distinct set of myths in which a statue comes from elsewhere. These statues are often considered dangerous and tied up, taken from the temple only once a year and associated with rites of reversal.93 The ritual schema of the statue’s removal from the temple, washing in the sea or river and return to its normal location can be paralleled by other Greek rites, such as the Athenian Plynteria, ‘Washing Festival’, and often signifies a return to normality after a period of abnormality.94 The comparable case of Artemis in Ephesos supports the idea that it was typical that the goddess was washed by females.95 In our case, we do not hear of new clothes, but that seems a plausible suggestion. Other signs of abnormality are the very cheap food consisting of barley cakes for Hera and the lying on 89 90 91 92

93

94 95

Kienast 1991; Niemeier and Maniatis 2010, with Taf. 14–19. Parker 2011: 193–95; Rutherford 2020: 91–94. Graf 1985: 93–96; Sourvinou-Inwood 2003: 79–89; 2011: 185–87. Aethlios FGrH/BNJ 536 F 3 = F 3 Fowler; Callim. F 100 Pfeiffer/Harder with Harder ad loc.; Paus. 7.4.2. Procles: Strabo 14.1.3, but see also Fowler 2000–13: 2.586–87, with n. 88 (on the makers of the statue). Graf 1985: 81–96; Faraone 1992: 136–40; Icard-Gianolio 2005; Eich 2011: 371–99; Boschung 2015. Cf. Sourvinou-Inwood 2011: 135–220; for Samos, see also Burkert 1985: 135. Cf. Sourvinou-Inwood 2011: 183–85.

Hera on Samos

twigs instead of the normal couches of the symposium as well as the wearing of the lygos wreath (see above). Finally, the anecdote about Syloson’s coup d’état is also at home in these types of festival, which were often the scene of putsches and revolutions, just as in more modern times.96 We have, then, in this ritual a schema of dissolution of the normal order with the statue leaving the temple, a degree of abnormality with the staying in huts, lying on twigs and the wearing of unusual garlands and, finally, the return to order with the relocation of the statue into the temple. As we saw, Burkert connects the ritual with the return of prosperity. There is no support in our sources for that interpretation, but the idea itself, that is, that the return must have coincided with a new beginning, seems well founded. Varro tells us that the cult-image of Samian Hera was dressed in a bridal garment and that every year a wedding ritual was celebrated.97 Fritz Graf suggests that Varro may have been mistaken because in his time Hera was mainly seen as a wife (of Zeus) and a goddess of marriages, whereas Robert Parker suggests that Varro may refer to another festival about which we know nothing or that he is mistaken.98 Yet it seems odd that this most erudite Roman, who had probably visited the island, as he had also visited Samothrace in 67 BCE, would have made a gross mistake.99 As in Ephesos the ritual of Artemis was connected with adolescence, one may wonder to what extent this was true too at Samos, as the priestess Admete was an adolescent (see above). However, that is all we can say, and until new evidence turns up, we have to leave the matter undecided at this point. Let us therefore turn to the second Samian festival of Hera, the Heraia.

Heraia In addition to the Toneia, we also hear about another Samian ritual, the Heraia, but the scholarly world has long been divided regarding the relationship between these two.100 Nilsson thought the two festivals were identical, and Pirenne-Delforge and Pironti seem to follow him.101 The 96 97

98 100 101

Graf 1985: 245–46, to which this case has to be added. Modern times: Le Roy Ladurie 1979. Varro apud Lactant. Div. inst. 1.17.8: itaque nobilissimum et antiquissimum templum eius est Sami, et simulacrum (sc. Iunonis) in habitu nubentis figuratum et sacra eius anniversaria nuptiarum ritu celebrantur. 99 Graf 1985: 96; Parker 2011: 195. Varro, Rust. 2 praef. 6. For the Forschungsgeschichte, see Avagianou 1991: 46–50. Nilsson 1906: 47; Pirenne-Delforge and Pironti 2016: 149.

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latter, like previous scholars, do not pay much attention to what we know about the Heraia. Admittedly, the festival is mentioned in our literature only rarely, but this is all the more reason to pay careful attention to it, as the first mention is a fairly early reference. The local historian Douris relates that the Samians ‘voted that their Heraia should be called Lysandreia’. This was an unheard-of move, which catapulted Lysander into the ranks of the gods. Not surprisingly, Douris also mentions altars, sacrifices and paians for Lysander. From the same source, we also learn that prominent poets, such as Antimachus of Kolophon and Choirilos of Samos, competed at the festival.102 The mention of the pankration in a somewhat contemporary inscription shows that the name Lysandreia lasted at least until 394 BCE, but also that sport was an important part of the festival, which is confirmed by an inscription dating to before the middle of the second century BCE mentioning competitions in wrestling and boxing as parts of the programme.103 The same inscription also notes performances of a classic tragedy, as well as new ones, new comedies and satyr plays, thus supporting the reference by Douris to poets; late lexicographers confirm the information by mentioning games but also sacrifices, to which we will come back momentarily.104 It seems hard to believe that the Samians would have honoured Lysander with a festival celebrated on pallets of chaste-tree with barley cakes. The joyful atmosphere of the Heraia, evoked by animal sacrifices, paians and the pankration, simply does not fit the Toneia: evidently, the Heraia had originally been a different festival. The content of the Archaic Heraia is lost in the dark and we can only speculate about it. Given the connection between Hera and coming-of-age rituals on Samos, it would not be unlikely that this had also been the case at the Heraia, as various cults in Greece were celebrated for Hera in connection with older adolescents. Indeed, the torch race by ephebes – which was an important part of the festival, as we hear of a torch for Hephaistos and one for Dea Roma as well as of the officials in charge of the race, the lampadarchai – is often a sign of a new beginning.105 102

103 104

105

Douris FGrH 76 F71 (= Plut. Lys. 18.2–4), to be read with F 26; Athenagoras, Leg. 14; Paus. 6.3.14; cf. Beck-Schachter 2016; Habicht 2017 (originally 1956): 1–3, 179; Thomas 2019: 294–96. IG XII 6, 1.334 (pankration, the sport also being mentioned in no. 335). IG XII 6, 1.173, also see 122 (comedy = Nicomachus T 4 Kassel/Austin); Hsch. λ 1438 Cunningham; Phot. λ 472 Theod. Race: IG XII 6, 1.173. New beginning: Graf 1985: 232–36.

Hera on Samos

A background in or connection with initiation can also be seen in the Heraia festival in Argos, which was probably the model for the Samian one, as we find the same athletic contests there. The Argive festival seems to have been celebrated in the month Panamos, the first month of the year, and a New Year festival would certainly fit a festival with an initiatory background or component, the more so as male youths apparently received a shield at the Heraia at the moment they entered adulthood.106 The military aspect might surprise in the case of Hera, but ‘her dossier as a warrior is impressive’.107 In this respect, it is interesting to note that a series of about seventy-five miniature shields, ranging from six to twenty-five centimetres in diameter have been found in the Samian Heraion, the oldest being of terracotta, the somewhat younger dating to the later Archaic period. Comparison with similar findings in the Cretan sanctuaries of Athena in Gortyn, of Zeus on Mount Ida and of Hermes and Aphrodite in Kato Symi have all been connected to initiation, as have the Samian one.108 The interpretation seems plausible for the early stages of the Heraion, but with the general disintegration of rites of initiation everywhere in Greece, except for Crete and Sparta, in the course of the Archaic and early Classical ages, we should not consider initiation the key to the Heraia through later times as well, as the political and social changes of the later Classical Age changed the character of the Heraion considerably. Fortunately, we have one more testimony, although it has often been misinterpreted. Quoting from the local epic poet Asius, who probably lived in the sixth century BCE, Douris gives us a description of the participants of the Heraia, which has often been taken as referring to the Toneia.109 It goes as follows: And they would go like that, when they had combed their locks, to Hera’s precinct, wrapped in fine garments, in snowy tunics reaching down to the broad earth. There were gold brooches on them, like crickets, and their hair tossed in the wind, bound in gold and round their arms there were elaborate bracelets.110

106

107 108

109 110

Argive Heraia, first month, shield and initiation: Burkert 1983: 162–68, who overlooked the important study of the festival by Arnold 1937; for the festival, see also Taddei 2020: 101–03. Argive calendar: Chauvet Garbit 2009. Kowalzig 2007: 304, n. 93, with further bibliography. See Brize 1997; add Kyrieleis 2020: 47–48; see also Johannessen 2020, with useful tables of the votives in the Heraion. Note also the many miniature shields in Hera’s southern sanctuary of Paestum: Giacco 2010: 674–75; 2015: 33–34. FGrH 76 F 60; Nilsson 1906: 49; Parker 2011: 172; Pirenne-Delforge and Pironti 2016: 150. Asius F 13 Bernabé/West (Loeb).

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It seems unlikely that such Samian fops and dandies would have gone to the marshy beach and lay down on twigs in their beautiful white clothes. Huts are also not the environment for well-known poets to perform. However, a festival with poetic performances, athletic contests and impressive sacrifices would certainly fit their showing off. I take it therefore that Asius describes the Heraia in a period of economic and cultural booming, that was, perhaps, the time of Polykrates. In due time, perhaps very quickly, the festival shed the name Lysandreia and returned to its traditional name: as such, it was still performed in Roman times.111 There is one last point to be made: in which month(s) were the Toneia and Heraia celebrated? Unfortunately, we do not know, but it seems not impossible that they were celebrated in the same or a successive month, with the Heraia coming not long after the Toneia, following the schema of dissolution of the social order (Toneia) and new beginning (Heraia).112 The mention of the west wind and the pleasant atmosphere of Nicaenetus’ poem perhaps suggest a late spring or early summer festival, but that is all we can say.

Worshipping Hera on Samos In the Dutch Reformed Church that I attended in my youth, we often had discussions about the slogan ‘Believing on Monday’, that is, about the question how to give shape to your faith outside the normal day of worship. Similarly, Hera was worshipped not only at the festivals, but her sanctuary must have attracted visitors all year round. It cannot be the place here for a detailed study of all the archaeological reports.113 It is also not my intention to look at those aspects of the sanctuary that will have been common to many other sanctuaries, such as the shops that sold material for sacrifices, votives and drinking equipment, of which there must have been many, or the potteries of the Archaic Heraion, which had its own design of cult ceramics, often with the dipinti ΗΡ(Η), but used only in the sanctuary and thrown away after usage, or its function as a kind of asylum for free persons and runaway enslaved.114 I will mainly 111 112 113 114

IG XII 6, 1.174 (Herald), 175 (agōnothetai), 342 (Race). For this schema in Argos, see Burkert 1983: 164. For a good survey of the sanctuary through the ages, see Walter 1990. IG XII 6, 1.169; Kron 1984; 1988: 144–48; Kyrieleis 1993: 139–140; IG XII 6, 1.163 (asylum), 169 (asylum: see also Tac. Ann. 4.14.1); Rigsby 1996: 394–96.

Hera on Samos

limit myself to a few observations on aspects of the sanctuary that may have struck the average Greeks as being different from what they might have seen in many other sanctuaries, such as its sacrifices, its votives, and its curiosities. The sanctuary itself must have been pretty large, as an inscription from the second century CE prohibits the cutting of trees, presumably those of the sacred grove, which was a standard part of many sanctuaries, but also ploughing, sowing, grazing of cattle, and drawing water from the Imbrasos.115 We hear of priestesses, if only in Roman times, in honorific decrees, but not of their statues.116 A priest is mentioned only in the third century CE, but from the third century BCE onwards we hear of neopoiai, a kind of temple curators, and there also were ‘sacred slaves’.117 In its heyday, the main temple of the Heraion – there were probably several other temples as well in the sanctuary– was one of the largest in the Greek world.118 It had been gradually enlarged and somewhat moved in the course of the centuries, apparently with the cult statue moving along; in Roman times, it often appeared on Samian coinage and seems to have been felt as being important for the Samian identity.119 Temple and cult statue may have moved, but the main altar always remained at the same spot, as it probably stood close to the lygos, the exact position of which in the Heraion has long been a bone of contention, even though it seems to have been located between the altar and the various successive temples.120 The fixed position of the altar is also an indication of the importance of sacrifice in Samian religious life; miniature altar votives from the sixth century BCE probably reflect this importance.121 About the sacrifices we are fairly well informed because the bones of the sacrificial fauna have been analysed in one of the first zooarchaeological publications of Greek sanctuaries.122 The excavators found nearly 18,000 pieces of bones, so that the

115

116 117

118 119

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For similar prohibitions, see Horster 2015; Birge 1982; Scheid 1993; Bonnechere 2007; IG XII 6, 1.171; cf. Brulé 2012: 112–19. IG XII 6, 1.327–32. Unlike in Athens, Delos and Rhodes; cf. Ma 2013: 173. IG XII 6, 1.333; IG XII 6, 1.169 (neōpoiai, sacred slaves, cf. Lupu 2009: 285–97, with detailed commentary) and 185–98 (neōpoiai); Buschor 1953b; Hallof 1998. Kyrieleis 2020: 132–33. This is debated: Held 1995; Larson 2016: 314; but see Kossatz-Deissmann 1988: 677–78; Hölscher 2017: 421–24. Thus, persuasively, Kerschner 2015: 225; see the discussion by Niemeier in Walter et al. 2019: 17–24. Walter et al. 2019: 134–36. For such arulae, see van der Meijden 1993; Calderone 1999. Boessneck and von den Driesch 1988.

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statistical evaluation of the remains rests on a solid basis. The popularity of sacrifice in the sanctuary can also be illustrated by the fact that a fourthcentury inventory of the temple mentions no less than nine sacrificial knives, machairai, which were kept in a special machairothēkē.123 The findings of the analysis are partially as could be expected, but partially also surprising. The most popular animals were cattle, which all over the Greek world were preferred for symbolic statements, and thus were the most prestigious sacrificial animals on votive reliefs.124 They are well represented in the finds of the Athenian Agora, and Athenian colonies, and allies even had to send a sacrificial cow to the Panatheneia.125 In other important sanctuaries, such as those of Apollo in Didyma and Artemis in Ephesos, cows (oxen) also constituted the majority, although they were often sacrificed rather young in the former, just as in Artemis’ sanctuary in Kalapodi.126 In the Heraion, though, the Samians usually sacrificed older cattle, of which the gender often correlated with that of Hera – cows being very normal in her case.127 It is perhaps in the nature of literature, or of changing circumstances, that in Roman times we can also hear of sacrifices of young cows as in an epigram of the Greek Anthology: ‘You, who rules Samos and who has acquired the Imbrasos, Hera, do receive, Lady, the birthday-sacrifice, these offerings of calves, by far dearest of all to you, as we know, who are skilled in the law of the blessed gods.’ Thus Maximus prayed while pouring a libation: and she assented firmly, and the threads of the Fates were not grudging.128

The Samians sacrificed sheep and pigs much less frequently, and fallow deer even more rarely, although sacrifice of the latter was more common in the Greek world than is often thought.129 It is rather striking that among those thousands of bone fragments none were found of the thigh and the tail, which were normally burned at the altar. Assemblages of these bones

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124 126

127 128 129

IG XII 6, 1.261.52–53. For the machaira, which was usually covered until the last moment, see Pl. F 98 Kassel/Austin; Ar. Pax 948 with schol. ad loc.; Eur. El. 810, IA 1565; Philostr. VA 1.1; Zen. 2.30 with Bühler ad loc.; most recently, Bonnechere 1999; Marrucci 2004; Metz 2005. 125 Klöckner 2017: 212–13. MacKinnon 2014: 238; IG I3 34.42, 46.11, 71.57 (cow). Didyma: Boessneck and von den Driesch 1983: 617 (young); Boessneck and Schäffer 1986. Ephesos: Bammer, Brein and Wolff 1978. Kalapodi: Stanzel 1991: 45. Boessneck and von den Driesch 1988: 10–11, cf. Hermary et al. 2005: 83–84. Anth. Pal. 6.243 = GP 2112–17 Gow/Page. Sheep and pigs: Boessneck and von den Driesch 1983: 22–35. Deer: Boessneck and von den Driesch 1983: 5, 37; cf. Bremmer 2019b: 334 (with full bibliography).

Hera on Samos

must have been buried at yet-to-be-discovered spots in the sanctuary.130 Another notable absence is the goat, of which only very few bones were found, only three per cent of the smaller victims as compared to ninetyseven per cent sheep.131 Pausanias tells us that the Spartans were the only people who sacrificed a goat to Hera, who therefore had the local epithet Aigophagos, ‘Goat-eating’.132 However, our traveller was not properly informed, as in Corinth it was told that when a goat was going to be sacrificed to Hera Akraia and the sacrificial knife had been hidden, the goat itself revealed its location – a nice example of Karl Meuli’s (1891–1968) famous Unschuldskomödie.133 Still, it is clear that goats were normally not sacrificed to Hera. Let us now turn to the dedications and votives. Visitors to the sanctuary, who walked from Samos city along the seven kilometres of the Sacred Way to the Heraion, would have been struck by the amazing five-metre-high kouros, dating to about 570 BCE, which ‘Isches, Oresios’ son, dedicated’, as the inscription on the thigh states.134 It was not the only kouros and korē dedicated, though, and we may at least mention the suggestion of Angelo Brelich (1913–77) that such upper-class dedications have to be related to the end of youth and entry into adulthood, even though this can be only one aspect of these dedications.135 Naturally, visitors would have equally admired the famous bronze krater and pedestal dedicated by the merchant adventurer Kolaios with its impressive height of about 4.50–4.80 metres, which Herodotus saw and described.136 The Archaic period was a period of economic and political boom for Samos, which reflected itself in the most amazing votives in the whole of the Greek world at that time, especially regarding those

130

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134 135

136

Boessneck and von den Driesch 1988: 40–41; Ekroth 2018a: 93–95; Nussbaum 2018. Hsch. κ 4077 Cunningham, †κρησίπαιδα· ἐν Σαμιακῇ θυσίαι ἡ λέξις φέρεται. δῆλον ὅτι μέρη ἱερείων λέγεται perhaps refers to these bones and suggests local sacrificial terminology. Boessneck and von den Driesch 1988: 40–41. Paus. 3.15.9; see also Hsch. α 1737 Cunningham; Suda αι 70 Adler. Hsch. α 2012 Cunningham; Zen. Ath. 2.30 with a very learned discussion by Bühler ad loc.; Prov. Bodl. 29; Phot. α 532 with Theodoridis ad loc., η 43 Theod; Suda αι 69. 235 Adler. Unschuldskomödie: Meuli 1975: 2.1005. Mohr 2013: 40–48; IG XII 6, 2.560. For these and other statues, see also Franssen 2011. Kyrieleis 1996; Walter et al. 2019: 172–74 (by Niemeier); Scholl 2020: 54–56. Kouroi/korai: Duplouy 2006: 236–43; Day 2019: 83–87; Walter et al. 2019: 175–76 (by Niemeier). Brelich 1969: 448–49, but for a more encompassing view, see Meyer and Brüggmann 2007. We should perhaps connect also the beautiful bronze statuette of a Samian offering bearer in Berlin to the end of youth; cf. Scholl 2020: 60–61. 4.152.4 with Corcella ad loc; Herodotus and the Heraion: Tölle-Kastenbein 1976: 53–62.

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originating from the Eastern Mediterranean.137 Samian merchants and mercenaries, who had worked in Naucratis and elsewhere in Egypt, not only came home with scarabs, faience and amulets, even though many more derived from Egyptianising Greek workshops, but they dedicated also more than 200 bronzes, which include those of the Egyptian goddesses Mut and Neith as well as of gods like Osiris, Horus, Bes and Hathor, and of several Egyptian priests.138 One can only wonder if the dedicants saw a relationship between Hera and these divinities, as we must do in another striking case which raises the same question. In the Heraion, three seventh-century figurines were found of a standing man with a sitting or squatting dog, which may be connected with Gula of Isin, the Babylonian goddess of Healing. We have no idea how they came to Samos, but they may well have been brought by a mercenary fighting in Babylon, like Alkaios’ brother Antimenidas.139 Does it mean that the dedicants saw Hera as a healing goddess as Burkert suggests? In any case, it is striking, as he noted, that the same combination of man and dog also occurs in the case of the healing Asklepios.140 The long-distance trade of the Samians may also explain the dedication of a series of stone blocks which served as the basis for ships not far from the temple.141 In addition to these real ships, forty little boats’ models of about 40 cm length have been discovered. Given that probably only a fraction of these boats have been recovered, we may assume that hundreds of these ships, both warships and trading vessels, had been dedicated, thus stressing the maritime aspect of Hera.142 Boat votives are not unknown elsewhere in Greece or in later religious contexts, but none rivals the Heraion in number.143 Were they meant to be commemorative of successful exploits as perhaps were the real ships? A way to ask for Hera’s protection or a sign of gratitude? They certainly show a maritime side of Hera that was unique in this respect. For the character of Samian Hera in the Archaic period, we must certainly note two other genres of votives. Around the altar, there were found a whole series of so-called house models, which seem to have been

137 138 139 140

141 142 143

For a survey, see Ringheim 2019. Bumke 2012; Webb 2016; Kyrieleis 2020: 23–24 and Taf. 10. Cf. Fantalkin and Lytle 2016. Burkert 1992: 75–79; contra: Pilz 2020: 210–12. For nice photos of a Samian and similar statuettes, see Niemeier 2014: 298. Walter et al. 2019: 109–10. Cf. Kyrieleis 1993: 141–43; Damianidis and Valanis 2017; Kyrieleis 2020: 75–76. Elsewhere: Göttlicher 1978: 64–65; Johnston 1985. Later times: Frijhoff 2002: 215–35.

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popular especially in the Geometric and Archaic periods in the Eastern Greek world, although lasting longer in the West. In the early period such miniature dwellings as votives were virtually limited to female divinities, Hera in particular, and were especially popular in the Samian Heraion.144 Unfortunately, their meaning is not clear. Do they also represent shrines or just normal houses? Were they dedicated by males or females, rich or poor? A sign of gratitude or hope for the future? Do we see here Hera as protectress of the family?145 We simply do not know. There is of course much more to say about the various votives, such as the striking ninth-century horse frontlet with four female nudes, which an Aramaic inscription identifies as a gift to the Biblical King Hazael of Damascus, and of which we can only speculate how it eventually landed in the Heraion.146 In the Archaic period, the sanctuary must have been a fantastic experience for the eye, where the visitor could see not only statues of humans or real ships, but also the jaw of a crocodile, teeth of a hippopotamus, antlers of an antelope, eggs of an ostrich, and bones of prehistoric animals.147 There were even peacocks walking about. The fact that on second- and third-century coins Hera’s cult statue is represented between two peacocks suggests that these exotic birds had survived the political revolutions of the previous centuries as living memories of the Heraion’s glorious period.148

Conclusions Let us finish by looking once again at Hera’s myth, rituals, and cult. Regarding myth, it is clear that Hera was completely appropriated by the Samians, as they claimed that she was born in the area of her sanctuary, had grown up on Samos, and had her first sexual experience on the island. Such local appropriations were not uncommon, and in this respect Hera

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145 146

147

148

For miniature votives, see Pilz 2011; Schattner and Zuchtriegel 2013. Cf. Schattner 1990, whose Samian evidence is completed by Walter et al. 2019: 123–28; Schattner 2001. Cf. de Polignac 1997: 116 (houses by women, ships by men, but without any proof ). Burkert 1992: 16 (also on the similar one for Apollo at Eretria); Gunter 2009: 124–27; Niemeier 2014: 296–97 (fine photo); Kyrieleis 2020: 41–42 and Taf. 16. Boessneck and von den Driesch 1981; 1993; Ekroth 2018b; Kyrieleis 2020: 31–32. Ostrich eggs have also been found in the Archaic layers of the Ephesian Artemision (unpublished: pers. comm., email Michael Kerschner 4 October 2020). Antiphanes F 173 Kassel/Austin; Menodotus FGrH 541 F 2; Kossatz-Deissmann, ‘Hera’, 678 no. 156 (cult statue).

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was comparable to, say, Zeus being born on Crete or in Halikarnassos.149 The striking detail in the story is the lygos, which is nowhere else connected with Hera: thus, an element of Hera’s local landscape was incorporated into the local religious discourse, but also used for the Toneia festival, in which other local features, such as lygos shrubs, the beach and the sea played important roles. The importance of the local also appears from the fact that Hera’s altar remained on the same spot despite the fact that the temples were moved. Another local feature was the Sacred Way between the Heraion and Samos City. When Asius describes the Samian youths, it is hard to imagine that these will not have walked in procession from the city to the sanctuary for the Heraia and other festivals, perhaps accompanied by the sacrificial victims.150 The Way must have been an important feature of the local geography, which will have served the population of the city to show off themselves during the festivals. Typically local aspects of Hera’s cult also were the maritime aspect with the dedications of the ships and Hera’s connection with fertility. For example, her sanctuaries in Argos and Corinth show much more jewellery and fibulae, but these have no ivory and terracotta pomegranates and poppies, let alone their seeds, which have been found in great number at Samos, sometimes of ivory.151 Elsewhere in Greece the pomegranate and poppy were associated with Persephone, but the statue of Hera in Argos had the former fruit in her right hand. As the pomegranate could signify both death and fertility, the latter meaning will have been prevalent at Samos for these flowers, as nothing points to death in the Samian Heraion.152 They do, then, point to Hera’s connection with the wedding and procreation.153 In other respects, though, the cult of Hera must have looked familiar. Its main features – sanctuary, temple, statue, sacrifice, and votives – have nothing special in particular. No foreigners would have been surprised by a superficial visit, except perhaps by the size of the temple and, at a closer look, by the Anatolian appearance of her statue. The real difference that 149 150 151

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Bremmer 2019b: 477–80. For processions, see, most recently: Kavoulaki 1999; Kubatzki 2018. Pomegranates/poppies: Kyrieleis 1993: 138–39; Kučan 1995: 19–22 (pomegranates), 45–46 (poppy pods); Kyrieleis 2020: 85–86 (by P. Brize). Argos and Corinth: see the table in Johannessen 2020: 63. Persephone: Richardson 1974 on Hom. Hymn Dem. 372; Sourvinou-Inwood 1991: 147–88; Mackin 2018. Argos: Paus. 2.17.4. Cf. Graf 1985: 206 (Hera and wedding); Baumbach 2004: 153–59 (votives and statuettes connected to pregnancy, birth, nursing and infancy). For the increasing importance of vegetation and agriculture, see Baumbach 2004: 174.

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visitors will have observed, then, would have probably been the enormous variety of foreign votives and dedicated objects. No other sanctuary could boast such a variety of objects from the Levant and Egypt. They will also have been impressed by those objects that must have been dedicated to enhance the social capital of their dedicants, such as the enormous kouros and the krater of Kolaios. Yet much later visitors will also have noticed that in Hellenistic and Roman times these spectacular private votives of the once bustling world of Archaic Samos were replaced by the community’s honorific statues, lists of athletic victors, honorary decrees, and royal and imperial letters. The Persian conquest and later Athenian occupation had been fatal for the aristocratic elite and with them for the sanctuary, which now went into a period of decline, even though there was some kind of revival in the Roman period because of support by the emperors.154 After the end of the sixth century BCE we do not seem to have any more dedications of ships and ship models or the ceramics used for the cult meals, whereas the pomegranates and poppies had already disappeared earlier. At the same time, the city seems to have become much more involved in the running of the sanctuary, which it does not seem to have been in Archaic and early Classical times, and athletic contests, so typical of the Hellenistic and Roman era, gained in popularity.155 It is the political developments that shaped the appearance and, probably, the performance of the cult. But whereas in the Archaic and early Classical Age, the cult had a global feel about it, in the course of time it became increasingly local. The local horizons of Greek religion were not fixed but moved with the times.

Bibliography Adiego, I. J. (2007) The Carian Language. Leiden. Arnold, I. R. (1937) ‘The Shield of Argos’, American Journal of Archaeology 41, 436–40. Avagianou, A. (1991) Sacred Marriage in the Rituals of Greek Religion. Bern. Balzat, J. et al. (eds.) (2013) A Lexicon of Greek Personal Names, volume V.B. Oxford.

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Note also the many terracotta horses, horse carts and horsemen, typical for the aristocracy; see Baumbach 2004: 164–65; Schulz 2019. In other words, the early cult does not seem to have been part of polis religion. For the current debate, see Kindt 2012; Parker 2018; Bremmer 2019b: 125–46; Beck 2020: 128–30. For these changes, see Furtwängler 1997.

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Polytheism and the Distribution of Votives in the Corinthia  

In this contribution the focus is on the area of ancient Corinthia that housed several sizeable Greek sanctuaries, including those of Poseidon at Isthmia, Hera at Perachora, and Demeter and Kore on Acrocorinth. All of these sanctuaries have yielded extensive assemblages of items left by worshippers as votives dedicated to the ancient Greek gods and goddesses. Through a careful study of the similarities and differences in votive deposits found at these sanctuaries, Tulsi Parikh is able to illuminate their uses within different local contexts. She combines the quantitative look at dedicatory assemblages with the qualitative look at individual objects or groups of objects to consider questions of the wealth and gender of those dedicating the votives as well as their geographical origin. In doing so, this study not only reveals that dedicatory assemblages can provide invaluable insights into the way in which the local constitutes itself in ever different ways at each of these sanctuaries, it also illustrates that material objects can point to both their practical uses as well as the thinking of those engaged in their circulation. Overall, then, Parikh’s study showcases the productive and important contribution that archaeological research can make to the study of the local horizons of ancient Greek religion. Correlating with conceptualisations of the local in Hans Beck’s chapter (2), the category of the local resurfaces here both as a physical space of interaction and religious experience and as an imaginary space that allows those frequenting it to connect to the supernatural and to each other in various ways. The gods were everywhere in the ancient Greek world: in cities and countryside, in art and myth, in every domain of human life. Their universality and plurality also allowed great room for diversity and variation: gods could be worshipped differently in different places. Scholars have often considered gods, sanctuaries, and religious customs of a particular place in relation to, or as a version of, a shared ‘Panhellenic’ religion, encouraged by the universal view of literary sources.1 But how should we I am grateful to Julia Kindt and Hans Beck for organising the conference, and to Robin Osborne and Tatiana Bur for reading, commenting on, and discussing the paper with me. 1 E.g. Burkert 1985; Bremmer 1994; Mikalson 2010; Parker 2005; 2011.

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understand Greek religion when general observations do not correlate with what is observed in a particular place? How should we interpret local variations not as exceptions to universally constructed norms but as part of the lived religious experience of the Greeks? Building on recent work on localism in Ancient Greece, this paper explores the diversities of Greek polytheistic religion, first and foremost, from a local perspective.2 It explores the local both as a physical space that individuals experience and that defines everyday experience, as well as an imagined space where social relations and religious interactions can be explored.3 A local perspective therefore has the potential to bring us closer to the lived experience of the ancient Greeks by providing insight into how worshippers acted and thought about the gods in relation to the world around them. That is, although the local and universal levels of Greek religion were variously intertwined, the ways in which people viewed the divine world are best understood in relation to the very sanctuaries they frequented, gods whom they worshipped, and material they used as part of their worship within their local world.4 My analysis introduces a different dimension to the study of local Greek religion by focusing on a form of evidence that has not received the attention it deserves in discussions of religious localism: namely, votive offerings.5 Votives are an especially useful category of evidence for such an investigation: given to the gods in exchange or in gratitude for divine favour, they are not only tangible mementos of this reciprocal relationship, but also, as objects specific to particular sanctuaries, they are locally specific lenses through which to understand ancient thought processes about the divine. My focus lies on an area of approximately 100 km2 around the Isthmus of Corinth – an area that encompasses the town of ancient Corinth, the full length of the channel and the areas immediately to its north and south (Fig. 5.1). This part of ancient Corinthia connects Attica with the rest of the Peloponnese, while the Isthmus and ports on the Saronic and Corinthian Gulfs allowed essential trade to the region by sea. The presence of three sizeable sanctuaries, Poseidon at Isthmia, Hera at Perachora, and Demeter and Kore on

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Most recently and notably by Beck 2020. For local religion, see esp. 121–60. Beck 2020: esp. 30–36. Polinskaya’s (2013) analysis of polytheism on Aigina further emphasises the values of a purely local perspective. For general overviews of Greek votives, see Rouse 1902; Simon 1986; van Straten 1981; 1992; Boardman et al. 2004. For more detailed studies, see e.g. Baumbach 2004; Patera 2012.

Polytheism and the Distribution of Votives in the Corinthia

Figure 5.1 Map of the Corinthia. Created on QGIS. Copyright Tulsi Parikh.

Acrocorinth, make it a particularly important area for study.6 I compare patterns of dedication at these sanctuaries in order to examine how different deities, located at close proximity, functioned in relation to one another, and how worshippers shaped and managed the relationship between the sanctuaries through the objects they dedicated. I consider how different gods coexisted within a particular space, not just politically and physically at borders or at centres of a region, but also conceptually in the minds of worshippers. I therefore explore patterns of religious thought and connectivity that illuminate our understanding of how

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For Corinthian sanctuaries and cults, see Morgan 1994; 1999; 2002; 2017. Archaic settlement information for this area is limited; a few known located settlements along the Saronic and Corinthian Gulfs including Schoinous at Isthmia and Oinoe north of Perachora are listed in Hansen and Nielsen 2004: 466.

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polytheism operated locally in this part of Corinthia and how this might, in turn, inform our understanding of the human experience of the divine more broadly. The votives from each site are, in the first instance, recorded statistically, since establishing a pattern of votive distribution requires a quantitative approach. This crude and inevitably imperfect evaluation of the dedications provides a starting point for more qualitative analyses and interpretations in the second half of the chapter.

Poseidon at Isthmia The Sanctuary of Poseidon at Isthmia is one of the oldest sanctuaries in the region. Located on the eastern slopes of the Isthmus, it occupies a commanding position between land and sea, along the main road between the Peloponnese and Attica (Fig. 5.1). The temple of the Archaic period was monumental in size (approximately 40  14 m) and dates from ca. 690–650 BCE to ca. 480–470 BCE, when it was destroyed by fire.7 Isthmia’s votive assemblage before the mid-eighth century is small, comprising mostly dining ware, which continues in quantity throughout the Archaic period (Tables 1 and 2).8 Most pottery is Corinthian but there is also a substantial proportion of Attic vessels, unsurprising given the sanctuary’s location. From the mid-eighth century onwards, paralleling the expansion of the sanctuary at the beginning of the Archaic period, pottery is overshadowed by a huge wealth and variety of other dedications. Particularly striking are the hundreds of dedications of arms and armour (e.g. Fig. 5.2), the earliest appearing at the beginning of the seventh century BCE but the majority from the sixth century to the end of the Archaic period, after which no evidence for weapons survives.9 Only the sanctuaries of Zeus at Olympia, Zeus on Mt. Parnes and Apollo at Kalapodi surpass Isthmia in quantity of arms and armour.10 The bronze and iron tripods at 7

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Broneer 1971: 3. For excavations of the Archaic site, see Broneer 1971: 1–56, 171; 1973: 1–6, 9–66. Sacrifice and ritual dining associated with these vessels are discussed by Arafat 1999; Morgan 1994: 110, 113; 1999; 2002: 45–47; Risser 2015. This includes 400 helmets, 44 bronze-rimmed shields (and innumerable other fragments), 30 greaves and 100 weapons (Jackson 1991: 245 and the report on the 2004 study season: https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/isthmia/annual-reports/2004-report/). Thousands of pieces of arms and armour were found at Olympia, including around 1,000 helmets, 840 blades and hundreds of other weapons (Baitinger 2001; Barringer 2010: 167–69; Frielinghaus 2011); over 3,000 blades on Mt. Parnes, many of which might be associated with

Polytheism and the Distribution of Votives in the Corinthia

Figure 5.2 Illyrian-type helmet from the Sanctuary of Poseidon at Isthmia, ca. 680–550 BCE. Archaeological Museum at Isthmia. Ephorate of Antiquities of Corinth. Photo: Tulsi Parikh.

Isthmia also pre-date the Classical period, and though totalling only approximately 30 in number, a small fraction of the hundreds uncovered at Olympia or Delphi, the number is greater than at any other Corinthian sanctuary.11

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hunting (M. K. Langdon 1976: 100; Palaiokrassa-Kopitsa and Vivliodetis 2015: 160); and around 1,000 pieces at Kalapodi, including at least 90 helmets, ca. 600 arrow- and spearheads, and other weapons (Felsch 2007: 208–30; Schmitt 2007). For Isthmia, see Raubitschek 1998: 77–96. For Olympia, see Maass 1978. For Delphi, see Rolley 1977. There is only very limited Archaic evidence from Temple Hill in Corinth: Robinson 1976: 217, pl. 56; Morgan 1999: 405. There is one clay example from Perachora: Payne 1940: 55.

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Other large dedications at Isthmia include metal cauldrons, bowls and basins, and furniture.12 Stone bases still in situ and fragments of statues indicate bronze, marble and limestone sculpture, including a limestone kouros of the mid-sixth century and an ornate marble perirrhanterion supported by four female figures from the mid-seventh century.13 In the sixth and early fifth centuries, marble for sculpture was imported from Naxos, Paros, and Thasos: local limestone was also used.14 Terracotta and metal figurines, which peak in the sixth century, are numerous at Isthmia.15 Animals, in terracotta and bronze, outnumber human figures with over forty per cent representing horses or horses with riders. These complement the dedications of arms and armour as well as the chariot fixtures found at the site, and the horse and warfare connection is strong, whether the chariots were themselves votive offerings or used as part of activities which took place within the sanctuary. There is also a high proportion of bulls, including one exceptional gold-leaf bull, measuring only 0.01 m across, and several other bronze and terracotta examples.16 Horses and bulls are typical of other Poseidon sanctuaries, including on nearby Poros, where conversely there is no evidence for weapons.17 Isthmia has also produced twenty-four terracotta models of boats from the late seventh to the late sixth century BCE. Besides strigils, styli, fishing equipment, and some plain pieces of jewellery, relatively few small, everyday objects have been recovered at Isthmia. After vases, small figurines make up the largest proportion of votive dedications (Table 1). Visually, however, the large, ostentatious, mostly metal dedications dominated the sacred landscape. An overview of Isthmia’s assemblage highlights what worshippers believed to be most appropriate for the sanctuary, as well as how the characteristics of individual sanctuaries could be defined through the material dedicated.18 However, to understand better the pattern of dedication and worship at one sanctuary within its local context, we must do so in the context of other sanctuaries to which any given worshipper might have turned their attention.

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For large metal vessels, see Raubitschek 1998: 13–24. For furniture fixtures, see Raubitschek 1998: 144–50. Evidence for furniture is also found at other large sanctuaries, such as Olympia (Richter 1966: 41), and furniture as dedication is attested in literature (e.g. Paus. 5.17.5–5.19.10). For bronze sculpture, see Raubitschek 1998: 1, 8. For stone sculpture, see Sturgeon 1987: 1–75. Sturgeon 1987: 2–3. Thomsen 2015. I am grateful to Elizabeth Gebhard and Arne Thomsen for granting me permission to study these objects at the Archaeological Museum at Isthmia. Raubitschek 1998: 1–4, pl. 1 IM615 (for gold-leaf example). 18 For small terracottas on Poros, see Alexandridou 2013. See also Kyrieleis 1993.

Polytheism and the Distribution of Votives in the Corinthia

Hera at Perachora The typical image of a sanctuary, with large dedications of marble and bronze, to which Isthmia adheres to a considerable extent, does not conform with what one sees at Perachora. Here small-scale – but often elaborately worked – objects dominate. The Heraion on the Perachora peninsula facing the Corinthian Gulf, was, like the Sanctuary of Poseidon, positioned along several sea routes at a point where communication to major centres, such as Corinth, Sikyon and Boiotia, was faster by sea than by land (Fig. 5.1).19 Recent work has shown, however, that even by sea this journey would not have been easy due to strong winds and a small harbour.20 The site was nevertheless well frequented and revered in antiquity, demonstrated by the sheer number of dedications at the sanctuary.21 These have been recovered from the lower site and the artificially levelled upper terrace, both of which contained Archaic structures, as well as the sacred pool north-east of the building on the upper terrace (Table 3).22 The assemblage comprises a large quantity of jewellery, including over 500 bronze rings from the Archaic and Early Classical periods; glass, silver and gold beads; and over fifty amber items. Many dedications are of high intrinsic value, and there are more items made of gold here than anywhere else in the Corinthia.23 Although the dedications at Perachora are less conspicuous than those from Isthmia, their monetary worth relative to their size is greater. There are also over 200 dress pins, some of which were abnormally large – too large to have fulfilled their function as dress accessories, and probably made solely for the purpose of dedication.24 These dedications mirror the thousands of pins and pieces of jewellery found at the Argive Heraion.25 Jewellery was not characteristic of all Hera sanctuaries, however: at Samos, paralleling Isthmia, kouroi

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Payne 1940: 2–3. For overview of site, see Tomlinson 1992; Menadier 1995. Ziskowski and Lamp 2015; see also Morgan 1994: 132. For the site as refuge due to its location at a difficult area of the Gulf, see Blackman 1966; Sinn 1990. Ziskowski and Lamp 2015. Payne 1940; Dunbabin 1962. In the initial reports, the two parts of the site have been interpreted as two separate Hera cults – Limenia and Akraia – but this has been convincingly challenged: Salmon 1972: 175–78; Tomlinson 1992: 328; Morgan 1994: 131; 1999: 411; Baumbach 2004: 16. 24 Payne 1940: 73–75. Payne 1940: 70–71, 172–75; Kilian-Dirlmeier 1984. For Argos, see de Cou 1905: 207–64; Strøm 1995: 85–87. The connection between Perachora and Argos is also demonstrated by the number of Argive imports pre-750 BCE at Perachora, including vases, clay discs, model buildings and a seal (Payne 1940: 22, 32–33).

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and shields (life-size and miniature) form a significant part of the assemblage.26 Perachora has also produced at least 800 Archaic terracotta figurines.27 The majority are standing or seated females, similar to those found at sanctuaries across Greece, including the Argive Heraion, Artemis at Brauron and the Demeter and Kore Sanctuary on Acrocorinth.28 Some hold birds, some children, and others wreaths. There are also animal figurines, including doves, non-native animals such as monkeys, and over fifty horses with riders, both male and female, or horses preserving traces of harnesses (Fig. 5.3). In style, these are similar to Isthmia’s horse and rider figurines. Isthmia, however, produced no female examples. The presence of dedications with military iconography at a sanctuary where arms and armour are rare (Perachora mainly received arrowheads in the Archaic period) and in contrast to a nearby sanctuary that received hundreds of weapons is worth noting (and will be discussed further below). The terracotta offerings at Perachora also include several koulouria, which are in the form of flat rings of bread and may represent a food that had special associations with the cult (Fig. 5.4).29 These were also found at a small nearby shrine of an unknown deity at Solygeia.30 Regarding the vases (Table 2), though the number of metal vessels surpasses those found at Isthmia, the majority of the Perachora examples are small phialai, most of which were found in the sacred pool and were probably used as libation bowls.31 Isthmia’s collection of metal vessels conversely comprises large bowls and cauldrons. Large and small aryballoi (for perfume or oil), kalathoi (basket-shaped pots for wool), and pyxides (small boxes for precious objects) dominate the Archaic pottery at Perachora. Drinking vessels are also popular, some, as on Acrocorinth, depicting dancing women and processional scenes. Tools, such as iron hooks and miniature mattocks, household items, including spindle whorls and loom weights, and other items, including a considerable number of strigils, also form part of the assemblage. As Chart 4 shows, it was common for Hera at Perachora to receive objects that were less common at Isthmia, such as jewellery, pins and 26 27 28

29 30 31

For Samos, see Freyer-Schauenburg 1974 (on Archaic sculpture); Brize 1989–90 (on armour). Jenkins 1940. For Argos, see Waldstein and Chase 1905: 29–39. For Brauron, Mitsopoulos-Leon 2009. For Acrocorinth, Bookidis 2010b: 145. Payne 1940: 67–69; Salmon 1972. Verdelis 1962. Verdelis idenitifies the deity at Solygeia as Hera (192); Stroud 1965, as Demeter. Payne 1940: 121; Raubitschek 1998: 22.

Polytheism and the Distribution of Votives in the Corinthia

Figure 5.3 Terracotta figurine of horse and female rider from the Sanctuary of Hera at Perachora, ca. 550 BCE. Height: 0.14 m (Payne 1940: pl. 100.165). Reproduced with permission from the British School at Athens.

Figure 5.4 Terracotta koulouria fragments from the Sanctuary of Hera at Perachora, 7th century BCE. Surviving circumference of both: ca. 0.20 m (Payne 1940: pl. 16.5, 8). Reproduced with permission from the British School at Athens.

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fibulae, and scarabs and seals. Conversely, Isthmia received objects that were extremely rare at Perachora, such as weapons and tripods. Though both sanctuaries received a large quantity of figurines, there are variations in the types received at each sanctuary (as outlined above). Noteworthy also, and not obvious from the tables or charts, is the increase in objects of eastern origin, or influence, at Perachora after 750 BCE.32 A number of metal items are Phoenician. Pottery was brought to the sanctuary from Laconia, Rhodes and Chios, as well as Etruria.33 There are hundreds of scarabs and other objects of faience, including thirteen figurines of Bes, glass beads, amber, bronze and clay statuettes, various items made of ivory, and a mirror that could be Egyptian.34 Given Perachora’s position on the Corinthian Gulf, there is surprisingly little from the west. At Isthmia, on the east, by contrast, dedications from outside Greece are conspicuously rare. There are marked variations between the two sanctuaries on either side of the Isthmus created by distinct dedicatory practices at each, revealing different ways of interacting with different gods at different sanctuaries.

Demeter and Kore on Acrocorinth The way in which worshippers distinguished between different gods and sanctuaries is further emphasised when we turn to another very different sanctuary in ancient Corinth. The Sanctuary of Demeter and Kore on the northern slopes of Acrocorinth was visible, unlike Isthmia and Perachora, from anywhere in the ancient city of Corinth (Fig. 5.1). The sanctuary had clear views of Sikyon, Perachora, the Isthmus of Corinth, the Saronic Gulf, and the mountains to the north and west. The site was made up of three artificial terraces, and by the second half of the sixth century, there were at least fifteen dining rooms on the lower terrace.35 The earliest dedications (twenty-four bronze pins and fibulae, and two rings) date to the beginning of the eighth century (Table 5).36 There is little evidence for any other dedications except pottery at the site until the Archaic period, when figurines occur in their thousands and continue to become increasingly popular throughout the Classical period. The 24,000 figurine fragments make up half of the total number of figurines recovered 32 34 35

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33 Kilian-Dirlmeier 1985: 225–30; Morgan 1994: 132. Shefton 1962. For the mirror, see Payne 1940: 142, pl. 46; Baumbach 2004: 38. Bookidis 2010a: 10–15; 2010b: 139–44. For dining rooms, see Bookidis and Stroud 1997: 22–49. For cult buildings on the middle terrace, Bookidis and Stroud 1997: 64–83; Bookidis 2010a: 11; 2010b: 139–40. For the upper terrace, Bookidis and Stroud 1997: 253–56; Bookidis 2010a: 15. Bookidis 2003: 248; 2010b: 138.

Polytheism and the Distribution of Votives in the Corinthia

Figure 5.5 Likna and offering trays from the Sanctuary of Demeter and Kore on Acrocorinth, late Archaic/Classical. Diameter: ca. 0.05–0.10 m. Archaeological Museum at Corinth. American School of Classical Studies at Athens/Ephorate of Antiquities of Corinth. Photo: Manolis Papadakis.

from the whole of Corinth, and around 1,800 have been assigned to the Archaic period.37 Most of the figurines are female, some carrying pigs, birds, vases or torches, but there are also a number of crouching boys. The larger-scale terracotta sculptures, many of which represent male subjects, range in size from one-quarter life-size to life-size.38 There were no sculptures larger than life-size at the sanctuary. So-called votive ‘cakes’ presented in model baskets called likna are extremely common, with over 500 examples in total from the sixth century to the end of the Classical period. As model food, they are similar in concept to the koulouria from Perachora but of a distinctly different shape. On Acrocorinth, Brumfield has identified seven types.39 They are all of local Corinthian manufacture, handmade and unpainted, and are all miniatures, ranging in size from 0.02 to 0.13 m. Some likna hold model grains or seeds, others are empty (though may have once held perishable items) and many have pierced holes, possibly for suspension from the temple walls or ceilings (Fig. 5.5). Miniature offering trays and vases, found in some number at most Greek sanctuaries, abound at the sanctuary on Acrocorinth from the second half 37 39

Bookidis 2010b: 145; see also Merker 2003. Brumfield 1997: 149–55; Patera 2015: 191–93.

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Bookidis 2009; 2010a: 81–122.

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Figure 5.6 Kalathiskoi from the Sanctuary of Demeter and Kore on Acrocorinth, 5th century BCE. Height: ca. 0.04–0.05 m (Pemberton 2020, fig. 8). Photo: Petros Dellatolas. Reproduced with permission from the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Corinth Excavations.

of the seventh century. Although most vessel shapes are represented by miniatures on Acrocorinth, kalathiskoi (miniature basket-shaped pots), kotyliskoi (miniature cups) and kratēriskoi (miniature mixing bowls) are the most common (Fig. 5.6).40 Kalathiskoi in fact outnumber all other types of votive offering at the site from the seventh until the late fourth or early third century BCE, with at least 2,000 fragments identified (Table 2).41 Miniatures (including the likna, vases, terracotta figurines and other objects, such as a tiny bronze folding stool) total over three-quarters of the sanctuary’s dedications.42 Comparing assemblages at three Corinthian sanctuaries (Chart 6) reveals just how distinct different local sanctuaries could be: Isthmia is characterised by large, extravagant metal gifts; Perachora by precious jewellery and imported objects; and Acrocorinth by miniature terracotta objects. Although ancient pillaging and modern excavation techniques inevitably affect what has been recovered, this does not justify treating such distinctions as arbitrary. So how might differences in dedicatory practice between sanctuaries be explained? What do divergences in the material reveal about how different sanctuaries, which were available to (but not necessarily frequented by) the same communities of worshippers, functioned in parallel and about the plurality of Greek gods within local contexts? Scholars have approached variation in dedicatory practice in a number of ways: by considering how different votive assemblages reflect social differences concerning, for example, wealth, social role and gender; by thinking in terms of practical issues, such as the closeness of a sanctuary 40 42

41 Pemberton 2020. Pemberton 1989: 19–25; Bookidis 2010b: 145. For offering trays, see Pemberton 2015. For miniature stool, see Stroud 1965: 19, pl. 9c. This pattern is mirrored at nearby Solygeia, where miniature vases abound (Verdelis 1962).

Polytheism and the Distribution of Votives in the Corinthia

to a harbour vis-à-vis its yield of foreign objects; and by attributing the choice of dedication to the divine roles associated with the deity venerated at a particular sanctuary.43 These factors clearly played some role: expensive gifts require wealthy givers; imported objects are more readily dedicated at harbours; small objects are easier to dedicate on mountainsides; fishing equipment, found at all sanctuaries of Poseidon, is plausibly associated with his role as god of the sea. But a local study of votives in Archaic Greece reveals more complex and more diverse patterns of dedication than the above statements allow.

Votives and Wealth Snodgrass has linked dedications with wealth and status, proposing that while cheap dedications reflected an egalitarian world, expensive ones differentiated their dedicators as of a higher status.44 Clearly, large offerings of marble and bronze, or smaller offerings of precious materials, were set up by those who could afford to commission large statues or who already owned ornate gold jewellery. As a result, scholars have focused on these extravagant and visually impressive dedications in relation to their wealthy dedicants, and have described sanctuaries as places for elite worshippers to show off publicly their wealth and success.45 A local focus on dedicatory patterns in the Corinthia, however, reveals such assumptions to be reductive: they sideline the variations of Greek religion. Concerning the Sanctuary of Poseidon at Isthmia, whose assemblage of votives fits the model of extravagant display, Morgan has convincingly argued that a desire for high social status drove the dedication of expensive objects and that Corinth hoped to emulate the prestige of Olympia at its own ever-expanding sanctuary at Isthmia.46 Due to the supposed inception of the Isthmian games two centuries after the appearance of tripods at Isthmia, tripods cannot be as easily associated with local athletic contest as at Olympia. Morgan’s interpretation of expensive dedications at Isthmia as 43

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The literature here is extensive and further elaborated below, but for social and practical issues, see especially Simon 1986; Morgan 1999; 2002; Snodgrass 2006. For dedications associated with gods or particular divine roles, see for example van Straten 1981; Simon 1986. Snodgrass 2006; see also Aleshire 1992. E.g. Scott 2010: 41–145; Jacquemin 1999: 245–97. Morgan 1999: 405–06. Cf. tripod fragment no. 295 IM2826 (Raubitschek 1998: xxxiv, 77–78, 81, pls. 18, 46), which is an exact copy of a tripod leg from Olympia B4350 (Maass 1978: 158, no. 110a, pl. 30).

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status symbols is therefore attractive, further consolidated by Isthmia’s position on the primary route of communication between Corinth and Athens – an ideal setting for individual and communal interests in the display of wealth. Perachora has also been considered a significant cult centre for Corinthian investment owing to the high value of many offerings.47 But there is nothing as obviously impressive or visually dominant as at Isthmia. The presence of simple bronze jewellery and pins at Isthmia, contrasting the abundance of ornate pieces at Perachora, further highlights this distinction. Similarly, at Perachora, the only reliably identified tripod is a terracotta example, contrasting the expensive metal tripods at Isthmia. Wealth is an evident factor at both sanctuaries but it manifests itself differently at each. Isthmia reaches out to a wide community through its prime location and its ostentatious assemblage of dedications. Worshippers entering the Sanctuary of Poseidon, or even passing along the main Archaic road to the north-west of the sanctuary, would be struck by the sheer volume of large dedications – the arms and armour that might have lined the route, the metre-high tripods and large metal vessels set up around the sanctuary, and the large marble basin perhaps positioned at the entrance of the temple.48 The ostentatious form of many of the Isthmian offerings, their unparalleled quantity in the Corinthia, and their large size clearly intended to be seen by visitors, not only highlight individual or communal interests in the display of wealth and status but, as integral and conspicuous parts of the sacred landscape, also shape and project the character of the cult to other visitors. In particular, the arms and armour, the chariots, and the horse and rider figurines altogether portray a strong military character, attesting to Corinth’s successes in war as well as to Poseidon’s greatness as a powerful fighter among the gods and a key player in Corinth’s victories. At Perachora, small yet ornate pieces of jewellery offer a more modest display of wealth. They were perhaps associated only with a small section of the population, who invested both time and effort to reach the shrine. Portability is a factor here, since small items would have been easier to transport. Jewellery, of which we find hundreds of items at Perachora and very little at Isthmia, is furthermore an individual gift, often a personal possession, indicating a more intimate connection between worshipper and goddess than the large Isthmian tripods and weapons, which interact 47 48

Morgan 1990: 213; 1999: 405; 2017: 200. For evidence of the Archaic road, see Broneer 1973: 18.

Polytheism and the Distribution of Votives in the Corinthia

closely not only with the god but also other passers-by or worshippers at the sanctuary.49 We might, moreover, draw a connection between the objects found at Perachora and the sorts of objects found in graves. Geometric and early Archaic burial assemblages within Corinth itself, such as those near the western gate of Acrocorinth and in the South Stoa, contain spear- and arrowheads as well as other small metal objects.50 The North Cemetery has yielded rings of different metals, iron pins, strigils, and vases, such as kalathoi.51 The prominence of these same objects at Perachora, within a sanctuary context, emphasises Hera’s orientation in the Corinthia towards the individual and the everyday. Although objects of high monetary value are popular at Perachora, the particular choice of small yet ornate personal items over large, spectacular gifts shows that conspicuous display of wealth was not a primary factor for dedication at this sanctuary. At a sanctuary like Acrocorinth, which received nothing ostentatious (contrast Isthmia) and very little of monetary value (contrast Perachora), but instead an abundance of miniature terracotta offerings, wealth is an unhelpful category of analysis. Small terracottas are found in all sanctuaries in Greece and were, of course, more accessible to a much larger proportion of the population than large bronzes. However, the popularity of miniature, and, we imagine, inexpensive, objects emphasises that, in terms of divine favour, size and intrinsic value were not necessarily relevant – here, bigger, or more expensive, was not better.52 Perhaps, for example, smaller objects allowed worshippers to make more frequent or multiple offerings.53 I shall discuss the specific use of miniatures in place of life-size counterparts below, but it is important to emphasise here that, although worshippers must have dedicated within their means, these offerings should not be dismissed as gifts from the poor. Rather, they should be treated as a way to understand what worshippers believed to be most appropriate for a particular god at a particular time and place.54 Small terracotta objects were 49

50 51 52

53 54

This is not to say that personal dedications did not also have some public function, but rather it shows the ways in which worshippers expressed their varying personal and communal needs to varying extents with different types of gifts. For ‘personal religion’ as a broad category combining the public and private, see Kindt 2015. Blegen, Palmer and Young 1964; Dickey 1992; Morgan 1999: 406–09. E.g. Grave 17, eighth century BCE: Blegen, Palmer and Young 1964: 24–26. Cf. Foxhall and Stears 2000: 7–8: ‘Miniatures and imitations . . . serve as substitutes for the poor or less devout in many shrines.’ Salapata 2011; 2015; 2018. For small, cheap offerings as gifts from the poor, see Hoppin 1905: 96; Dunbabin 1962: 290–91; Kyrieleis 1988; 1993; Morgan 1990: 45; Klebinder-Gauss 2015: 114. Contrast Salapata 2018, who

155

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considered most pleasing for Demeter and Kore on Acrocorinth in a way that large metal dedications were not. We therefore need to consider votives – large and small, expensive and inexpensive – as not only socioeconomic statements but also reflections of how humans thought about the gods and the relations between them within the local sphere. Such aspects are difficult to discern when we think in terms of wealth alone.

Votives and Practicality of Location I proposed above that we might explain the presence of small objects at Perachora by the location of the sanctuary, making smaller objects easier to bring to Hera. Although the nature of the Perachora assemblage might support this theory, it certainly does not hold true for a number of other sanctuaries during the Archaic period. People travelled great distances to transport large dedications, such as tripods, to sanctuaries all over Greece, including the Sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi, the Ptoion Sanctuary in Boiotia and the Samian Heraion. The geographical location of a sanctuary, though important, does not entirely determine the types of objects dedicated. This is demonstrated in particular by the quantity and nature of nonCorinthian items received by the three Corinthian sanctuaries examined here. Acrocorinth, despite its central and accessible location, had a very local appeal, attracting mainly Corinthian-manufactured objects. Isthmia received few dedications manufactured outside Greece but many Attic imports. Perachora received very little from Attica but a lot from the east despite its location facing west. The situation at Isthmia can be explained by its position at an interchange between the Peloponnese and Attica, and at Acrocorinth by its proximity to the centre of Corinth, but the unique presence of imported offerings from the east at Perachora is hard to explain in terms of location. Morgan has proposed that, while the Sanctuary of Poseidon at Isthmia had already been defined with its Greek focus, the Sanctuary of Hera (established later) became responsible for new interests, such as trade, which developed in Corinth in the eighth century.55 Worshippers, including inhabitants of Corinth and visitors to the region, may have dedicated

55

makes the case for offerings to be seen for their symbolic value; see also Ekroth 2003; Pilz 2011; Patera 2015: 182–83. Morgan 1999: 414; 1994: 135, 140.

Polytheism and the Distribution of Votives in the Corinthia

imports brought directly to Perachora by sea, or those already circulating within the region. The primary factor regarding where to leave these dedications was not necessarily the location of the sanctuaries, as one might expect for imported goods, but concerned the specific ways in which the roles of Hera at Perachora and Poseidon at Isthmia were understood within the Corinthia. Poseidon at Sounion, by contrast with Isthmia, attracted a number of objects from the east, including scarabs and faience figurines, further emphasising that universal assumptions about the nature of a god, based on the pattern of dedication at one sanctuary, must be made with caution (see further below). Similar phenomena, where one of two local sanctuaries at close proximity seems to have received all or most of the foreign dedications, occur elsewhere in Archaic Greece. At Emporio on Chios, there is an abundance of dedications that come from outside Chios, often from the Greek East, at the sanctuary at the harbour, but almost none at the Sanctuary of Athena on the acropolis about 700 metres away. This was noted by Boardman, who explained the divergence by the location of the sanctuary on the harbour.56 The entrance of the temple faces the shipping entrance of the port, and there is no doubt that the foreign nature of the dedications and the sanctuary’s geographical relationship with the sea go hand-in-hand. But the Athena Sanctuary is less than a kilometre away and easily accessible from the harbour. The presence of sixteen sea-snail shells at the acropolis sanctuary shows that worshippers did bring with them objects from, or associated with, the coast, but these were in the form of natural objects rather than imported items.57 We might consider the shrines of Zeus on Mt. Hymettos and Mt. Parnes in Attica in similar terms. Of these mountaintop sanctuaries dedicated to Zeus, both receiving large amounts of pottery, Hymettos received exclusively Attic ware, Parnes a large quantity of Corinthian ware and some Boiotian ware, in addition to Attic vessels.58 Though Parnes was closer to the Attic border, access would not have been easy to either sanctuary, and the decision regarding which dedication one ought to carry to which mountaintop shrine must have been conscious and considered. Corinthian pots were considered fitting for Zeus on Parnes but not for Zeus on Hymettos.

56 57 58

Boardman 1967: 64; see also Simon 1986: 115–16; Morgan 1990: 232; cf. Osborne 2004: 4. For the shells, see Boardman 1967: 243. For Hymettos, see M. K. Langdon 1976. For Parnes, M. K. Langdon 1976; Palaiokrassa-Kopitsa and Vivliodetis 2015.

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 

Sanctuaries connected in certain ways, such as by locality, region, or identity of deity worshipped, commonly differed in their local and external appeal in ways not necessarily associated with the practicalities of accessing the site. Deities and sanctuaries could have a limited focus, bound by the needs of the local community, as on Acrocorinth. Sometimes sanctuaries also appealed to neighbouring regions, as at Isthmia. Or, deities such as Hera at Perachora could connect and appeal to populations both within and outside mainland Greece. Though sanctuaries were bound by location, the nature of worship was subject to how worshippers defined the relationship between different sanctuaries within a particular context and how they viewed the role of the gods within that place.

Votives and Gender Dedications are often gendered male or female according to the identity of those dedicating them and/or of the deity receiving them. Miniature dedications and certain everyday items, such as jewellery and toiletries, have been thought to indicate predominantly female worshippers as well as a female deity. Boardman, for example, reckons the unknown deity at the Harbour Sanctuary at Emporio to be female because of the belts and jewellery dedicated.59 Military dedications have similarly been associated with male worshippers and male deities since warfare was primarily a male activity.60 Though for certain objects gender was an important element (weaving tools for women; weapons for men), there are a number of exceptions. Both male and female gods received small dedications and miniatures. Poseidon at Isthmia received terracotta figurines of women and miniature vases. Apollo at Bassai received large quantities of miniature bronze arms and armour as well as many miniature vessels with only a few regular-sized weapons and pottery (a pattern which parallels Demeter and Kore’s overwhelming number of miniatures on Acrocorinth closely in form and Poseidon’s assemblage of large sculpture and metal armour in its military theme).61 Similarly, female deities often had military roles and received military dedications: small lead soldiers were dedicated to Artemis Orthia,

59

60

Boardman 1967: 63; see also Kahil 1977; Simon 1986: 170–82, 198–205, 221–22, 267, 415; Morgan 1999: 404. 61 E.g. Simon 1986: 415–16; Whitley 2001: 141. Cooper 1996: 70–73.

Polytheism and the Distribution of Votives in the Corinthia

and weapons to Hera at Samos and Athena on the acropolis.62 There are serious limits to explanations based on gender for the presence of particular votive types at a particular sanctuary. Examination of Hera’s main domains of responsibility further highlights that the division between the sanctuaries, and the division between the gods, in the Corinthia are not as clear-cut as male versus female.63 Through art and myth, we know of Hera as goddess of marriage and her connection to female fertility and childcare, and we can assume that worshippers had some sense of this during the Archaic period. The abundance of jewellery and pins, the figurines of women carrying children and the spindle whorls and loom weights might map onto these characteristics. But, although Perachora yielded very few weapons, which might, without further qualification, suggest that, in the Corinthia, only Poseidon (whose assemblage has very clear military overtones) was responsible for the concerns of warfare, Hera did receive terracotta figurines of armed men and women on horses (Fig. 5.3). The distinction between the types of objects – weapons on the one hand and figurines on the other – is one to which I shall return later, but for now we note the overlap between the fields of responsibility that the gods held even within close geographical proximity, represented by the dedication of different types of objects. Furthermore, the presence of horses with female riders at Perachora points in favour of a male and female divide, since the female examples were found dedicated only to Hera, and not to Poseidon, and also against the strict association of horses with rich men or male activity, further complicating using male and female as votive categories. Comparing the role of potentially gendered dedications within the Corinthia emphasises that, just as wealth and location are only parts of the story, so too is gender. Clear divergences between sanctuaries suggest a pattern of dedication that was not accidental, but explanations based on social factors tell us more about human relations than about the divine, or about human attitudes towards the divine. Rather, patterns of votive dedication across three Corinthian sanctuaries provide an avenue through which to explore the plurality of ways that worshippers reflected on the nature of the divine at a local level. That is, the ways people chose to worship their gods within

62

63

For lead soldiers at Orthia, see Wace 1929: 262–63, 269, 272–75, 278, 279. For Samos, Jantzen 1972. For the acropolis, Wagner 1997: 161–64. For arms and armour at sanctuaries of goddesses in general, see Larson 2009. Cf. Osborne 2009: 89, who states that tripods, arms and armour at Isthmia ‘stress male contributions to civic life, Perakhora . . . bring[s] women’s contribution much more to the fore’.

159

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 

a particular place are theological statements, where the ‘theology’ – or ‘theologies’ – of ancient Greek religion signify the variety of articulations of the religious and conceptions of the gods as expressed by worshippers.64 So, a local study highlights the differences within Greek religion and how worshippers negotiated the relationship between sanctuaries through the material they dedicated; a study of the theologies of dedication on a local scale finds a place for this difference and a way to explore the mental, emotional and intellectual experience of the divine. In this way, local divergences from certain (often universal) trends of dedication, investigated above in relation to wealth, place and gender, and currently treated as anomalies in the scholarship, in fact offer us the best possible insight into the religious context of sanctuaries and patterns of thought in relation to divine interaction.

Votives and Deity One way to explore the theologies of dedication is by thinking in more detail about the role of the gods in the act of giving: to what extent did Poseidon or Hera or Demeter and Kore determine the choice of dedication? There are objects that are unique to certain deities or very much identified with them, such as torches and figurines carrying pigs for Demeter on Acrocorinth, at Eleusis and on the Athenian Acropolis, or fishing equipment for Poseidon at all his sanctuaries. There are also, however, huge variations across the Greek world. Hera, for example, received many pieces of armour at Samos, yet few at Perachora. In contrast to Isthmia, Poseidon on Poros did not receive any weapons, but a number of miniatures and a large number of seashells.65 The assemblage on Poros, in fact, shares more similarities with Perachora and Acrocorinth than with Isthmia, consisting of miniatures, such as kotyliskoi and kalathiskoi (also found on Acrocorinth) as well as pyxides, aryballoi, kalathoi and koulouria (found at Perachora).66 We cannot and should not use universal ideas about a particular god to make assumptions about how worshippers communicated with that god at any given sanctuary. Variation at sanctuaries across Greece sacred to the same god

64

65

For a detailed examination of ‘theologies’ of Greek religion, see Eidinow, Kindt and Osborne 2016. 66 Theodoropoulou 2009. Alexandridou 2013: 72–112, 142.

Polytheism and the Distribution of Votives in the Corinthia

instead emphasises the diversities of dedicatory practice and the diversity of gods available to ancient worshippers, as well as the advantages of studying these variations on a local scale in order to understand the role of gods both within a particular place and in relation to other gods who formed part of the physical and religious world of the worshippers within that place.

An Alternative Model: ‘Raw’ and ‘Converted’ It is clear that we need different ways of thinking about the diversity of gods in Archaic Greece as well as about human relationships with the supernatural. A distinction first drawn by Snodgrass between ‘raw’ and ‘converted’ dedications is particularly useful here.67 ‘Raw’ dedications are objects that were once functional in the everyday and were in some way connected to the life of the dedicant before being handed over to the divine. Jewellery, weapons and tools are some examples. ‘Converted’ dedications were made specifically as votives for the divine and include certain figurines and miniature versions of everyday objects as well as oversized imitations and monumental statues.68 These might be manufactured by the dedicants themselves, specially commissioned, or bought readymade, perhaps locally.69 During the eighth century, ‘converted’ offerings demonstrate an overall increase across the whole of Greece, eventually overshadowing so-called raw objects. Snodgrass reckons this a natural mental and social shift.70 However, if we look at contemporaneous differences between local sanctuaries, the choice between ‘raw’ and ‘converted’ gifts is more complex than a chronological shift or a change in the mental attitudes of all worshippers. At Corinth, throughout the Archaic period, the Demeter and Kore Sanctuary received ‘converted’ offerings almost exclusively, including thousands of miniature vases and model ‘cakes’. At Isthmia,

67

68

69 70

Snodgrass 2006: 263–67; see also Hughes 2017, who uses the terms ‘non-purpose made’ and ‘purpose made’. It is not always possible to determine whether terracotta figurines are ‘raw’ or ‘converted’. Some were likely used in domestic contexts, for example, as children’s toys. However, the prevalence of similar types of figurines (both in terms of shape and technique of manufacture) at particular sites, as well as evidence for workshops at sanctuaries (see n. 69), demonstrates that many were made specifically for dedication. For local workshops at sanctuaries, see Herrmann 1964; Heilmeyer 1979: 275. Snodgrass 2006: 266.

161

162

 

‘raw’ weapons and ‘converted’ statues dominated the landscape. At Perachora, the large quantity of jewellery and tools (the ‘raw’) and the terracotta figurines and oversized pins (the ‘converted’) were more-or-less equally represented throughout the Archaic period. At the same time, and within the same local context, one sanctuary could receive a large number of ‘raw’ dedications while a neighbouring site received an influx of predominantly ‘converted’ offerings.71 These ‘converted’ offerings, furthermore, took different forms from site to site. Snodgrass’ chronological interpretation, therefore, does not account for variation at a local, synchronous level. We can use the categories of ‘raw’ and ‘converted’ in a more productive way than Snodgrass proposed – theologically rather than chronologically or socio-economically. The terms define how human objects came to be used as objects for the divine, and therefore thinking with these categories allows us to reflect on the choices humans made in relation to their objects and in turn to the gods through their objects: in what way were the objects tied to the life of the worshipper before dedication? Were they specially produced for the occasion and, if so, in what form? How do these patterns vary across different sanctuaries or places, and in relation to different gods? Worshippers were making a number of decisions about the ways in which they used, manipulated, and deposited certain types of objects at particular sanctuaries, from which theological conclusions can be drawn about the ways in which humans understood their relationship with the divine and defined particular aspects of their religion through the objects they dedicated. Votives convey ‘the beliefs that there exist communicative gods’ who partake in the exchange of gift-giving.72 Using the ‘raw-converted’ paradigm, however, we can make interpretations about the nature of the communication between humans and gods, and therefore the nature of the ‘communicative god’ as expressed by worshippers through their gifts: what forms were the gods imagined to have, and what were they imagined to like or not like? To unpack this further, I consider votives relating in some way to the agricultural roles of Demeter and Kore on Acrocorinth and Hera at Perachora. Demeter was universally understood to play a large role in the agricultural affairs of the area over which she presided, as is evident in the

71

72

There is also a grey area between the two categories, which is less evident amongst the dedications presented here, but is observed at other sanctuaries, for example, weapons that were deliberately bent out of shape prior to dedication at Kalapodi in Central Greece (Felsch 2007). Eidinow et al. 2016: 4.

Polytheism and the Distribution of Votives in the Corinthia

Homeric Hymn to Demeter and supported by the presence of dedications of terracotta figurines carrying piglets, terracotta figurines carrying vases on their heads, trays of model food, and thousands of miniature kalathoi, the life-size versions of which would have held wool or fruit (Table 7).73 These votives are similar not only in their association with agriculture and fertility, but also in their ‘converted’, and specifically miniature, form – a common feature of the Acrocorinth assemblage in general. At Perachora, on the other hand, in addition to terracotta figurines of animals as well as miniature models of tools and bread, one finds ‘raw’ agricultural equipment and over a thousand life-size kalathoi. With such great multiplicity of gods in the Greek world, overlapping responsibilities are inevitable. What the differences between ‘raw’ and ‘converted’ offerings highlight, however, is the ways in which the overlapping roles of gods within local contexts were understood by worshippers and managed by the types of objects they deposited at the sanctuaries. By bringing ‘raw’ objects to Perachora, worshippers chose to dedicate something that they once owned and used. In this way, worshippers interacted with Hera at Perachora concerning their agricultural needs through the things with which they were already familiar from their own world. Once displayed within the sanctuary, there was a shift in meaning from the real (the tool functional as a tool) to the symbolic: the ‘raw’ tool no longer held its original human function, but instead acted as a gift for the goddess that represented this function, speaking to Hera’s role in practical matters relating to everyday life. By dedicating ‘converted’ objects to Demeter and Kore on Acrocorinth, worshippers interacted with the divine by creating what they believed to be most appropriate and most pleasing for the deities. Votives were specially made for the goddesses not in the form of impressive statues, but rather as modest, often mass-made miniatures. The combination of ‘converted’ yet humble is important because it reasserts the earlier observation that wealth and ostentation were not primary determining factors for the choice of dedication at this sanctuary. The modest form of the dedications should be understood not only as an alternative to expensive dedications, but as a choice made in relation to the divine. The objects are a specific type of modest offering that is not simply a personal belonging but a handcrafted, often miniature, alternative. They are objects apart from everyday life, their

73

E.g. HH 2.4, 471–73.

163

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 

abstract form not only representing agricultural fertility but also alluding to more abstract connections between agricultural and human fertility. Similar distinctions can be observed between weapons and armour at Isthmia on the one hand and terracotta models of warriors and horses at both Isthmia and Perachora on the other. Both represent aspects of warfare, but they do so in very distinct ways. A helmet would have come directly from the battlefield, whether it once belonged to the victorious dedicant or the defeated enemy (Fig. 5.2).74 A terracotta figurine conversely had no use in war (Fig. 5.3). As noted above, Hera at Samos received a vast quantity of weapons in addition to terracotta figurines of warriors, and Poseidon on Poros received no weapons but a small number of terracotta horse figurines and model chariot wheels.75 Worshippers actively decided what to give to which god, but the differences between the offerings cannot be a simple case of Poseidon versus Hera, nor of male versus female. It must rather be connected with the specific nature of the different gods at these particular sanctuaries and the roles and functions of the gods as imagined by the people who worshipped them at a particular place. Weapons at Isthmia might reflect its interstate location. The large bronze and iron arms were symbols of military success, power and status, and a direct link to a particular battle at which the dedicant might have fought. Conversely, the small purpose-made figurines are less directly associated with specific battles and should not be understood as displays of military prowess but rather as reflections of other human concerns relating to everyday aspects of war. Perhaps representing a prayer for the safe return of a soldier from battle, hope for a successful military career, or a transition between childhood and adulthood, the terracotta figurines provide an example of Hera’s role in male domains of daily life, yet with different emphases to Poseidon’s more obvious presence in the male sphere. The differences are indicative of how worshippers perceived their relationship with Hera and Poseidon, as well as how they perceived the relationship between the two gods within the region. Although Hera’s agricultural role at Perachora was represented by a number of ‘raw’ and ‘converted’ objects (the tools, vases and figurines), her military role was primarily represented by a particular type of ‘converted’ object (figurines of warriors and horses). This division demonstrates not

74

Jackson 1991.

75

For Samos, Jantzen 1972. For Poros, Alexandridou 2013: 142.

Polytheism and the Distribution of Votives in the Corinthia

only different ways of interacting with different gods at different sanctuaries, but also different ways of interacting with the same god at the same sanctuary in relation to different divine roles. An absence of weapons at Perachora reflects the way that the sanctuaries at Isthmia and Perachora worked in parallel, displaying a division of dedications and of divine identities between the two sites. We might thus also understand the presence of weapons at other Hera sanctuaries, such as Samos, as a result of the absence of nearby sanctuaries to take on the role which in the Corinthia was attributed to Poseidon. Despite certain overlap of object types at the different sanctuaries and ambiguities regarding the specific roles of each god, patterns of dedication manifest both the diversity of the many gods and the desire to define their many roles and functions. The local thus emphasises the distinctness between sanctuaries as well as the connectivity between them, while differences between ‘raw’ and ‘converted’ objects demonstrate the different ways worshippers responded to, and conceived of, the relations between gods as well as their own relationship with the divine. ‘Raw’ objects not only left a memento of the dedicator at the sanctuary, but also brought the human world closer to the gods and the gods closer to the personal and practical matters of the dedicator’s life.76 Dedicating ‘raw’ offerings formed a connection with the gods by situating them in relation to one’s immediate local world, and treating the sanctuary as an extension of this space. ‘Raw’ offerings therefore appealed to a view of the gods as human-like, or with human characteristics. ‘Converted’ offerings highlight the complexities of defining and interacting with the ‘other’. Though all votives to some extent created human presence within the sanctuary, ‘converted’ objects, rather than forging a direct relationship between the human world and the divine, acknowledged a world at some remove from daily reality – even ontologically different – in many ways treating the divine world as separate from the local sphere.77 They conjured up a world of story-telling and representation, where the object symbolises that which it imitates, as well as that which is considered most pleasing for the god. By dedicating ‘converted’ offerings, worshippers brought into the sanctuary objects that represented how they imagined the gods to be, thus forming a connection with the gods in relation to the divine world as constructed by humans. In this way, the dedications not only invited intimacy between

76 77

For ‘raw’ objects as mementos, see Hughes 2017. For the inherent ‘otherness’ of the divine, see Gould 1985.

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worshipper and object, and between worshipper and god, but can also be seen as a way of understanding the unknown and reimagining the world.78 There is therefore a constant play between closeness and distance which is embodied in ‘converted’ offerings, an idea upon which I expand in the next section.

The Miniature and the Monumental Miniatures are a special case of ‘converted’ object. Not only are they imitations of real objects but they are imitations explicit in their defunctionalisation of the object’s everyday use through miniaturisation. Of miniature objects in general, Stewart argues that a change in size highlights a contrast between the physical and the abstract features of the original object.79 Charms or amulets, she says, can be miniature versions of everyday objects which are then worn around the neck or carried on the person for luck or protection. They signify more than the object they were made to represent, and thus a reduction in dimensions should not be considered also a reduction in worth.80 Although small offerings have practical advantages, facilitating transportation and allowing frequent or multiple dedications, the form of these small offerings as ‘converted’ miniature models rather than simply small everyday objects must be explored in relation to their religious context. On Acrocorinth, the terracotta likna (described above, Fig. 5.5) might represent Demeter’s associations with corn and harvest, but the miniaturisation of the likna and model food puts these objects at a further remove from their original life-size versions. This deliberate manipulation of scale creates an alternative world, further emphasised by the fact that we rarely see these offerings next to full-size counterparts, but rather in place of them.81 Despite evidence for a number of dining rooms, where drinking and dining ware would have been used, the pottery assemblage on Acrocorinth is overwhelmingly miniature (Fig. 5.6). At Perachora, by contrast, besides the abundance of drinking vessels, there are many aryballoi, for oil or perfume, and pyxides, for precious objects. Kalathoi appear mostly in life-size form (only 40 of over 1,000 are miniature). When 78 79

80

Miller 2005: 214. Stewart 1993: 37–69. For miniatures in general also: Foxhall 2015. For miniatures in sanctuaries, especially miniature vessels: Ekroth 2003; Hammond 2005; 2014; Gimatzidis 2011; Luce 2011; Pilz 2011; Barfoed 2015a; 2015b; 2018. 81 Stewart 1993: 41–44. See also Platt 2018: 148.

Polytheism and the Distribution of Votives in the Corinthia

miniatures, such as hydriai, or oversized objects, such as pins, occur, these are found alongside their ‘raw’ counterparts. At Isthmia, besides miniature hydriai and a small number of other vases, there are few ‘converted’ items imitating everyday objects, whether miniature or oversized. Instead, ‘converted’ objects primarily take the form of objects in their own right – figurines of warriors and kouroi.82 On Acrocorinth, we see the world recreated in miniature; at Perachora, a representation of everyday life; and at Isthmia, the construction of a more conspicuous display of divine power. Popular at all three sanctuaries are figurines: on Acrocorinth, seated and standing females carrying offerings; at Perachora, females, horse and riders, and other animals; and at Isthmia, a greater number of animals – mostly bulls and horses – than human figures, and some miniature boats. The figurines, especially on Acrocorinth, contribute to the alternative world created by the overwhelming number of miniatures. Upon entering the sanctuary, one would see an array of miniature vases and miniature trays of model food, and alongside them small figurines of women carrying even smaller vases or items of food, thus representing and constantly reperforming the act of dedication. These almost ‘dollhouse-style’ storytelling scenes emphatically showcase a world created by worshippers for their gods, made up of material representations of how people imagined their relationship with the gods to operate. Oversized versions of everyday, personal items, such as the pins from Perachora, were found less frequently at sanctuaries than miniatures but, like the miniatures, would not have been functional as the objects they were imitating. The decision to enlarge, rather than reduce, the size of the original object reflects another way in which worshippers imagined their gods, who were frequently anthropomorphised, but distinguished from humans on reliefs and paintings by their larger size. Even if not physically larger, they were considered greater, more powerful, and better-knowing than humans. The divine was both familiar yet distinct enough to be divine; divine characteristics were aspired to but always knowingly out of reach. Similarly, an oversized pin had a sense of familiarity in the object it represented, but was manipulated to be distinct and suitable only for divine use. What we see here is the adaptation of material for an imagined and constructed divine world. Miniature and monumental dedications show

82

Cf. Patera 2015: 183 on substitutes: oversized and miniature human figures cannot be about economics as they are not dedicated in place of, or as substitutes for, real people.

167

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how worshippers used and manipulated objects to define the gods with reference to their own world. That is, it is not possible to think about the divine ‘other’ without thinking in relation to, or in opposition to, what is familiar. Miniature and monumental dedications speak to their life-size counterparts and in some way reflect the meanings that were associated with them, but they also introduce a new way of experiencing the world, reimagining relationships with the material and conceptualising relationships with the gods. Local distinctions in dedicatory practice can therefore reveal how worshippers variously perceived the gods to be present within their local world.

Conclusions A local study of dedicatory patterns at selected Greek sanctuaries shows us the varieties of ways of approaching the supernatural available within a single community that are not limited to the universal trends associated with the mythology of particular gods across Greece. Diversities on a local level – concerning ways of articulating the nature of the divine and ways of theologising through different objects at different sanctuaries – reveal patterns of thinking in relation to how worshippers perceived of the divine world with reference to their local world and therefore how they imagined the gods to be present in place. This, in turn, informs our understanding of how worshippers approached the gods, thought about the gods, and shaped the relations between, and with, the gods in different contexts through their gifts. The inevitable locality of archaeological evidence further helps us to determine expressions of religion that play out in the local sphere as well as inform our understanding of divine interaction more broadly. In particular, thinking about dedications using the ‘raw’ and ‘converted’ model reveals how worshippers communicated with the gods by situating them within their own local world, as well as by highlighting the closeness and distance between the human and the divine to varying degrees. There is evidently no single way in which humans and gods interact, but there are varieties of interaction, and varieties of theology. We need to be comfortable not only with the multiplicity of the gods and of the dedications that we find at different sanctuaries, therefore, but also with the multiplicity of ways in which a local community thought about and defined the divine through objects, and we need to see all of this together as a part of the plurality of ancient Greek polytheistic religion.

Polytheism and the Distribution of Votives in the Corinthia

169

Appendix: Tables and Charts Table 1 Votives from the sanctuary of Poseidon at Isthmia83 Geometric Early Archaic Late Archaic Total Archaic (ca. 900–750) (ca. 750–600) (ca. 600–480) (ca. 750–480)

Classical

Arms and armour

70+

130+

577*

Tripods and tripod stands

8

11

30

Large-scale sculpture84

1

1

13

15

Small-scale sculpture 18

3

273

610

11

13

3

48

32

Terracotta ‘cakes’ Pins and fibulae

6

3

Jewellery and accessories

6

2

8

9

Scarabs and seals Tools

2

180

5

Household/ other everyday

4

26

39 132

Lamps 18

31

102

22

291

?

2,168*

?

Coins

126

126

2

Other

13

32

30

Metal vessels Pottery

85

260

Further breakdown of artefactual categories: Arms and armour: helmets, shields, greaves, swords. Large-scale sculpture: marble perirrhanteria, marble, limestone, and bronze statues. 83

84 85

For all tables, the numbers are based, where possible, on a minimum count. The pottery is calculated by the number of sherds. Where two sherds are known to come from the same vase, this is counted as one. Where statistical information is unavailable, quantity is indicated by ‘many’, ‘few’ etc., where this information is known. There are a further 512 uninventoried marble fragments (Sturgeon 1987: 187–88). There are thousands of kilos of pottery from 700 to 550 BCE (Arafat 2015: 119). Publication for the Archaic pottery is forthcoming (Arafat 1999: 60).

170

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Small-scale figurines: terracotta: horses and horses with riders, bulls, dogs, birds, boats, female, male; metal: bulls, dolphins, boats, horses, small wheels, male statuettes. Jewellery: rings, earrings, gold and silver beads, plaques and discs, belt buckles. Tools: callipers, chisels, hammers, axes, fishhooks, fishnet weights. Everyday: furniture fixtures, spatula, strigils, styli. Other: lead pieces, chariot fixtures, other fixtures, mask, coral. None to my knowledge. *

Thousands more fragments.

?

Mentioned in site reports but no, or otherwise inadequate, indication of quantity provided, or publication still outstanding.

Table 2 Vase types (bronze and terracotta) at Isthmia, Perachora and Acrocorinth during the Archaic period Isthmia

Perachora

Acrocorinth

Drinking vessels

361*

772*

(many)

Vessels for carrying liquids (hydriai, amphorae)

(many)

39

24

Miniature vessels for carrying liquids

(many)

23

(many)

Pouring vessels (oinochoai, jugs)

22

628*

(few)

Large bowls

28

1

Aryballoi, alabastra, lekythoi

1,000*

226

Phialai

4

244

Pyxides and lids

9

717

?

Kalathoi

?

1,000*

3

2

2,000*86

Miniature kalathoi

5

Offering trays

1

3

1,000*87

Other miniatures

182+

100

1,000*

Total known (incl. other shapes not mentioned here)

2,270*

4,384*

3,167*

86

87

The number is based on intact examples; at least 7,000 fragments were found at the Demeter and Kore sanctuary in total (Bookidis 2010b: 139, n. 16). Thousands of offering trays have been found dating from the mid-sixth century BCE onwards; many have been lost (Pemberton 2015).

Polytheism and the Distribution of Votives in the Corinthia

171

Table 3 Votives from the sanctuary of Hera at Perachora Early Archaic (ca. 750–600)

4

4

52

Tripods and tripod stands

1

1

Large-scale sculpture

1

5

6

122

187

473

Arms and armour

Late Archaic (ca. 600–480)

Total Archaic (ca. 750–480)

Geometric (ca. 900–750)

Classical

Small-scale sculpture

21

Terracotta ‘cakes’

14

Pins and fibulae

12

17

1

294*

2

Jewellery and accessories

12

21

2

244

1

Scarabs and seals

4

789

Tools

1

50+

Household/ other everyday

11

12

12

253*

Lamps

7

13

20

11

Metal vessels

4

216+

243+

3

1,761

745

4,141*

272

4

4

1

4

66

4

Pottery

1,555+ 29

744*

67

Coins Other

27

13

6

4

891 77+

Further breakdown of artefactual categories: Arms and armour: arrowheads, miniature weapons. Tripods: clay model. Large-scale sculpture: perirrhanteria.

172

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Small-scale sculpture: terracotta: females, horse and rider, birds, bulls, lions, monkeys, relief plaques; ivory: sphinx, female, lions, dogs, rams, Egyptian-type divine figurines, plaques; bronze: lions, dove, gorgon, cows, rams, horses, plaques – Herakles, horsemen, chariots. Terracotta cakes: koulouria, loaves. Pins and fibulae: regular-sized and over-sized. Jewellery: rings (bronze, silver, gold), pendants (silver, gold, amber), earrings (bronze, silver, gold), beads (glass, silver, gold), bracelets, bands of gold leaf. Tools: hooks, nails, mattocks, miniature mattocks, miniature hoe. Everyday: spits, spindle whorls, loom weights, ladles, miniature ladles, strigils, ivory styli, mirrors, game boards. Other: coral, discs, miscellaneous.

Chart 4 Votives at Isthmia and Perachora during the Archaic period (excluding vases)

Polytheism and the Distribution of Votives in the Corinthia

173

Table 5 Votives from the sanctuary of Demeter and Kore on Acrocorinth Geometric (ca. 900–750)

Early Archaic (ca. 750–600)

Late Archaic (ca. 600–480)

Total Archaic (ca. 750–480)

Classical

26

26

130

1,280

1,800*

2,000+

13

500+

Arms and armour Tripods Large-scale sculpture Small-scale sculpture88

510

Terracotta ‘cakes’ Pins and fibulae

24

80

Jewellery and accessories

2

(many)

Scarabs and seals Tools

6

6

Household/ other everyday

100+

100+

?

10

128

138

55

16

228

3,000*

Coins

1

1

2

Other

8

14

1

Lamps89 Metal vessels Pottery

0

Further breakdown of categories for Archaic period: Large-scale sculpture: male statues. Small-scale sculpture: terracotta: females, males; bronze: bulls. Terracotta cakes: likna with / without food. Jewellery: rings. Tools: iron knives. Household and everyday: strigils, spits, loom weights, knucklebones. Lamps: full-size and miniatures. Other: stands (maybe for lamps).

88

89

Over 24,000 fragments were found (Bookidis 2010b: 145). Publication for Archaic terracotta figurines is forthcoming (S. Langdon 2019). 4,181 fragments in total from second half of seventh to mid-second century (Bookidis 2015: 71).

174 Chart 6 Votives at Isthmia, Perachora and Acrocorinth during the Archaic period (excluding vases)

Polytheism and the Distribution of Votives in the Corinthia

175

Table 7 Main types of raw and converted votives at Isthmia, Perachora and Acrocorinth during the Archaic period

Perachora

Acrocorinth

Isthmia

90

Raw

Converted

- Agricultural tools - Arrowheads - Household objects - Jewellery - Pins and fibulae - Drinking vessels - Hydriai - Aryballoi - Phialai - Pyxides - Kalathoi - Other vases - Figurines

- Miniature agricultural tools

- Household objects - Pins and fibulae - Jewellery - Lamps - Drinking vessels - Other vases - Figurines

- Miniature household objects e.g. table

- Arms and armour - Tripods (?)90 - Tools - Household objects - Jewellery - Pins and fibulae - Coins - Lamps - Drinking vessels - Large bowls - Aryballoi - Other vases - Figurines

- Oversized pins - Miniature hydriai

-

-

Other miniature vases Figurines Koulouria and loaves Clay tripod

Miniature lamps Miniature drinking vessels Miniature kalathoi Miniature hydriai Other miniature vases Likna and model food Figurines Large-scale sculpture

- Tripods (?)

-

Miniature hydriai Other miniature vases Figurines Kouroi

Snodgrass (2006: 264) gives tripods an ‘intermediate status’ between ‘raw’ and ‘converted’.

176

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Demeter Chthonia at Hermione: Landscapes and Cult  

This chapter moves into the south-eastern Argolid and the city of Hermione, known for its intense natural environment. Initially located on a narrow promontory stretching into the Saronic, Hermione and its hinterland are characteristic of precarious and often inhospitable surroundings that gave rise to associations with the underworld. Diana Burton discusses a prominent cult in the city which is known mostly through Pausanias, and for which he relates a peculiar, if not bizarre ritual: the killing of a frisky cow with sickles by four old women in the most prominent temple in town, that of Demeter Chthonia. Burton’s discussion embarks from the observation that ancient Greek settlements occupied three categorically separate yet interwoven landscapes – the natural, the human, and the imagined environment. Their tracing in Hermione discloses multiple levels and layers of localisation, but it also steers the investigation to places where all of these vectors combined. In the highly inclusive cult of Demeter Chthonia, the blend included communal preference, local vegetation, and a deliberately local variant of underworld conceptions. It appears impossible to explain why the cow ritual took the idiosyncratic form that it did. The concluding comparison with cults of Demeter Chthonia elsewhere suggests, however, the close interplay between agricultural and eschatological aspects. Although united with other Demeter cults under the same epiclesis and in accordance with the polymorphous nature of Greek religion, the cult in Hermione attests to lively conversations with the specific features of the local landscape, and the desire of the community to make sense of it.

Introduction Our understanding of the form and function of a particular god, as expressed through his or her cult, is determined by a range of factors. These include the nature of the deity, the particular aspect of his or her power denoted by the epiclesis associated with the cult, the rituals observed, and, not least, the local landscape. This last aspect includes not only geographical elements – city cult or rural cult, the presence of springs,

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mountains, and so forth – but also metaphorical ones: local readings of the landscape in mythical and/or cultural terms. Through this lens, this chapter examines the enigmatic cult of Demeter Chthonia at Hermione. The cult and its ritual, as described by Pausanias, have attracted a great deal of scholarly attention, but there is still no consensus as to its purpose or function.1 This chapter discusses the cult in the context of the interplay between divine identity – that is, the generally recognised persona of a Greek deity – and the ways in which the cult of that deity is shaped by factors particular to the locality, such as topography and polis identity. The subtle differences from other cults of Demeter Chthonia elsewhere underline the strong influence of local factors, particularly those related to the underworld. Demeter’s role at Hermione can be understood from her association with other local deities, both in the same sanctuary (not only with Kore but also with Klymenos/ Hades) and in the region, where several different cults of Demeter exist.2 The mythical and physical landscapes of Hermione also influence her cult (the isolated hillside position of the cult, with its entrance to Hades and associated myths, and a ‘place’ (chōrion) in the sanctuary called the Acherousian Lake).3 The cult thus evokes not only the agricultural function that we expect of Demeter’s divine persona, but also an eschatological function that arises from the specifics of the local environment.

Localisation, ‘Landscapes’, and their Interaction with the Divine Persona Susan Guettel Cole, in her book Landscapes, Gender and Ritual Space (2004), suggests that ‘ancient Greek communities inhabited three landscapes: the natural, the human, and the imagined’.4 The natural world consists of topographical features such as mountains, rivers, and plains, and the flora and fauna that inhabit them. The human landscape consists of changes and additions to that natural world, but, I would suggest, it also includes the less tangible results of human action and interaction, such as communities (and their histories), familial and other relationships, laws and institutions, customs and behaviours. Finally, the imagined landscape, for Cole, consists of the imaginary realm of monsters and mythical peoples at the geographical margins of the known world, and of the underworld, 1 3

Paus. 2.35.4–8. Paus. 2.35.9.

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2 Association with Klymenos: Paus. 2.35.9; IG IV, 686–91. Cole 2004: 7.

Demeter Chthonia at Hermione

the world of the dead. For me, this imagined landscape lies close to the natural and human landscapes – overlies them, in fact, since for the ancient Greeks divine narratives are frequently embedded in both natural phenomena and human interactions, and every community is shaped by its local myths and heroes, its gods of local hill and spring and cave as well as of the city and household. As Hans Beck notes, ‘local’ for the Greeks embodied both territorial and metaphorical facets.5 No wonder, then, that Greek religion is so strongly affected by its local dimensions. A temple is not just a building for the god, but an object which draws together these three landscapes, and is shaped and influenced by them in ways peculiar to its specific location. The persona of a god, that is, his or her role and function, interacts with the character of these landscapes. A very broad example is the tendency to establish sacred sites in accordance with the character of the deity: Poseidon near the sea, Hephaistos near smithies, Athena in the heart of the city, the Nymphs in caves. Both natural and human landscapes are at work here. But more specific, localised aspects of landscape are also in play: Zeus’ sanctuary at Olympia is influenced both by the natural landscape – even by the flies in the summer, for which there is an altar to Zeus Apomyios, Averter of Flies – and by the imaginary landscape, the rich mythical history of the place which resulted, for example, in the presence of Pelops’ hērōon.6 The location of a cult, therefore, is not only physical, but can be defined as a location within any one of these landscapes, or in more than one. And of course the god may occupy more than one role in that location: Zeus has altars at Olympia under at least ten different epicleseis, or cult names.7 A local identity can therefore be defined as a specific adoption or adaptation of some part of the divine persona to suit one or more of the local landscapes as outlined above. In this chapter, I use the cult of Demeter Chthonia at Hermione as a case study to explore the local dimension of Greek religion through the lens of such cultic landscapes. ‘Local’ is a fluid term in the context of this cult. Local factors, as I will show, range from a particular topographical feature that forms one small part of the sanctuary to a broader regional preference for one deity over another. In the context of Hermione, local beliefs and topography strongly influence the cult. What

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6 Beck 2020: 35. Zeus Apomyios: Paus. 5.14.1. Paus. 5.14.4–5.15.5: Olympios, Laoetas, Herkeios, Keraunios, Katharsios, Chthonios, Katabaites, Agoraios, Moiragetes, and Hypsistos (twice). These are the altars on which the Eleans sacrificed monthly. It is likely the actual total would have been much larger.

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is local is to some extent delimited by contrast to what is not local: one sanctuary within the polis as opposed to another, one aspect of the cults in the polis in comparison with its chōra, something unique to the chōra or region in comparison with other regions nearby. I therefore conclude with a brief discussion of Demeter Chthonia elsewhere, in order to show how a local identity can persist or adapt when it is transferred to other landscapes, whether cultic or literary.

Hermione: Polis and Chōra, Topography and Character Hermione is a polis in the eastern Argolid. If we follow Pausanias’ account, it was initially built along the peninsula known as the Bisti, with the seaward end of it acting as a sanctuary and also fortified for defence, and the town stretching out towards the mainland. The city in Pausanias’ time had been rebuilt four stades (roughly 600 m) inland, on the base of the hill named Pron and the flat area below it. Pausanias’ description makes a sharp distinction between the two areas, but in reality that may have been the result of an organisational principle of Pausanias’ rather than the reality on the ground.8 Hermione and the eastern Argolid were sited, as Alfred Philippson noted, ‘on land [which] could be reached only via treacherous paths through rugged mountains’.9 Hermione is, however, readily accessible by sea, with a deep sheltered harbour; in the Iliadic Catalogue of Ships it is already referred to as βαθὺν κατὰ κόλπον, ‘enfolding a deep gulf’.10 In other ways, too, it looked to the sea, as it produced and traded in the expensive purple dye extracted from the murex shell.11 This was a luxury item, much sought after, widely traded and famous, as we can see from Plutarch’s description of Alexander the Great, who found purple dyed fabric from Hermione when he occupied the Persian royal palace at Susa, to the tune of 5000 talents in weight (perhaps in the region of 125 tonnes).12 The large (possibly exaggerated) amount indicates not the ease of acquiring it but the truly unthinkable wealth of the Persian kings. Hermione’s apparent isolation, then, is deceptive, as the town is widely known. Its harbour enabled 8 9

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Lightfoot and Whitmore 2018: P1: ‘city walls are maintained as organizational forms’. A. Philippson, Der Peloponnes: Versuch einer Landeskunde auf geologischer Grundlage (Berlin, 1892): 49, cited by Beck 2020: 97. 11 Hom. Il. 2.560. Beck 2020: 98. Plut. Alex. 36. Weight: based on a minimal 25 kg per talent, OCD4 s.v. ‘weights’.

Demeter Chthonia at Hermione

trade not only with the rest of the Argolid but also with Ionia and points east. Hans Beck has pointed out that Hermione not only produced dye and dyed fabrics for export but also exported the raw materials – the murex shells – and so became the hub of a network of artisanal industry throughout the Argolid.13 Its links to the outside world can be seen in the number and variety of cults in the lower town – over twenty different cult sites, including eastern deities such as Isis and Serapis.14 Its isolation by land does have an effect, however, since its cult landscape is quite different from that of the central Argolid. One might expect that Hermione’s religious focus would be towards the sea, and in fact cults of Poseidon have particular importance in this area. But Hermione’s primary deity, and that of the surrounding area, is Demeter.15 Pausanias lists five cults of Demeter in the area of Hermione: Demeter Thermasia has one shrine on the border with Troizen and another in Hermione itself; also near the border at Eilei is a sanctuary of Demeter and Kore; Demeter and Kore have a sanctuary on the headland of Bouporthmos; and of course there is the Sanctuary of Demeter Chthonia.16 Recent intensive surveys have added to our knowledge; as well as three cult sites in the city itself, there are five that we know of in the chōra of Hermione.17 And Demeter’s cult in the area starts early. There was a cult of Demeter at Halieis in the seventh century BCE, to judge by a deposit including figurines of the goddess carrying pigs.18 In Hermione itself, her cult can be traced back at least until the sixth century through a fragment of a hymn in her honour by the poet Lasus.19 Her importance is shown by her appearance on coins from Hermione from the fourth century onwards.20

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14 Beck 2020: 98. Jameson 2004: 153. Demeter Thermasia, Paus. 2.34.6, 2.34.11; at Eilei, 2.34.6; Bouporthmos, 2.34.8; Demeter Chthonia, 2.35.4–10. Paus. 2.34.6 (Troizen); 2.34.11 (Hermione); 2.34.6 (Eilei); 2.34.8 (Bouporthmos). Jameson 2004: 154. In the city: E19j, E19d, E19s. In the chōra: E100 (Thermasia), E102 (Bouporthmos), A15 (Halieis), D12 (Didymia), G101 (Eilei); perhaps also C17? (Mases). Jameson describes these as being in the ‘chora of Hermione’, but some are in separate poleis (e.g. A15 in Halieis) – though it is worth noting that Halieis is only a 2.5–3 hours’ walk from Hermione (McHugh 2017: 106). Jameson’s site numbers are drawn from Jameson, Runnels and van Andel 1994; prefixes refer to modern administrative divisions (Jameson 2004: 167). Jameson 2004: 169–70, A15; Hall 1997: 101, citing K. O. Müller, The History and Antiquities of the Doric Race (Oxford, 1830), 414. Lasus F 702 PMG. Head 1911: 442. For an example see Boston, Museum of Fine Arts 97.442, silver hemidrachm from Hermione with the head of Demeter wearing a wreath of wheat on the obverse and the city’s monogram EΠ framed by another wreath on the reverse: https://collections.mfa.org/ objects/4084/hemidrachm-of-hermione-with-head-of-demeter.

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Although a significant proportion of the population of Hermione itself was probably engaged in the murex trade, the majority of Hermionians, like the inhabitants of most Greek poleis, were likely peasant farmers; some lived in the country but many probably lived in the city and rode or walked out to their fields in the countryside, and many probably never ventured beyond their city and fields.21 The fields in question were, as recent GPS research around Hermione has shown, mostly within an hour’s walk, though some were further out.22 The obvious corollary is that the city was closely integrated with its countryside. It would be easy to link Demeter’s importance in the area with its agricultural nature, but in fact this kind of predominance seems to have been rare for Demeter, and she is not usually the principal deity of a polis.23 Also worth noting is the contrast between Demeter’s predominance in the chōra of Hermione and in the eastern Argolid by comparison with the central Argolid where Hera is predominant – her great sanctuary at Argos being but one example.24 Correspondingly, there are comparatively few Demeter cults in the central Argolid, and few Hera cults in the east around Hermione. And Demeter seems to have presided over functions that are the preserve of Hera in the Argolid plain.25 Similar dedications – terracotta pomegranates, loom weights, and cakes – are found at the two goddesses’ sanctuaries, and they even share the iconography of polos, wreath, and pomegranate.26 What, then, does the local dimension of the cult of Demeter in the eastern Argolid involve? Hermione is topographically but not culturally isolated. In terms of geography, several levels of localisation are visible here. At the regional level, in the eastern Argolid there is a distinctive local preference for Demeter rather than Hera. Turning to the specific cults, many of the cults in Hermione and in the eastern Argolid more generally were probably small, drawing attention only from those who lived and farmed in their immediate vicinity, and may thus be defined as local to their specific communities and probably little known beyond them. The cult of Demeter Thermasia, with its two sites, may have been an exception,

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Beck 2020: 32. McHugh 2017: 114 (and Chapter 4 passim). Bintliff 2006: 25–27 on this pattern in Greece more generally. Cole 1994: 201; 206 cites Hermione as unusually rich in Demeter cults. 25 Beck 2020: 97; Hall 1997: 101. Hall 1997: 104. Ibid. Hera: Paus. 2.17.4 describing the statue of Demeter in the Argive Heraion. Pausanias records only two Hera sanctuaries in the eastern Argolid. Hera does in fact have a sanctuary on the Pron above Demeter’s (Paus. 2.36.2), though Pausanias says nothing further about it; see Jameson 2004: 192 E32.

Demeter Chthonia at Hermione

with one shrine at the border of Hermionian territory and one in the polis itself: this is a local cult at the level of the chōra. In practice, of course, such levels of localisation are not as clearly demarcated as presented here. It is also clear that the local identity of the eastern Argolid religion is influenced by aspects of the human, physical, and imaginary landscapes. An examination of the cult of Demeter Chthonia shows how localisation can function on a range of different levels to influence a particular cult.

Local Factors in the Cult of Demeter Chthonia With these different aspects of localisation in mind, I now turn to the cult of Demeter Chthonia in Hermione. As noted above, the goddess is identified with the cult at Hermione from at least the sixth century BCE.27 The cult site was, almost certainly, the most prominent in Hermione. It was evidently of impressive size, and probably dominated the hill above the town, including as it did at least three temples, three ‘places’ (chōria), and a stoa large enough to echo.28 Little, if anything, is left; there are remains of substantial walls on the upper slopes of the Pron which are likely to be those of the sanctuary, but that is all.29 The site on the side of the hill is typical of sanctuaries of Demeter, as is its placement just outside of the city.30 Fortunately for our knowledge of the cult and sanctuary, the travel writer Pausanias, writing in the second century CE, describes in some detail both the site and the ritual taking place there.31 There was an elaborate procession, likely from the old city at the east end of the Bisti. This was the public part of the festival, and the whole community was involved: ἡγοῦνται μὲν αὐτοῖς τῆς πομπῆς οἵ τε ἱερεῖς τῶν θεῶν καὶ ὅσοι τὰς ἐπετείους ἀρχὰς ἔχουσιν, ἕπονται δὲ καὶ γυναῖκες καὶ ἄνδρες. τοῖς δὲ καὶ παισὶν ἔτι οὖσι καθέστηκεν ἤδη τὴν θεὸν τιμᾶν τῇ πομπῇ· οὗτοι λευκὴν ἐσθῆτα καὶ ἐπὶ ταῖς κεφαλαῖς ἔχουσι στεφάνους. πλέκονται δὲ οἱ στέφανοί σφισιν ἐκ τοῦ ἄνθους ὃ καλοῦσιν οἱ ταύτῃ κοσμοσάνδαλον, ὑάκινθον ἐμοὶ δοκεῖν ὄντα καὶ μεγέθει καὶ χρόᾳ.

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28 29 Lasus F 702 PMG. Paus. 2.35.9–10. Jameson 2004: 181. Hillside site: Béquignon 1958. On the margins of the city: de Polignac 1995: 22. Exceptions: Cole 1994. Paus. 2.35.5–8.

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The procession is headed by the priests of the gods and by all those who hold the annual magistracies; these are followed by both men and women. It is now a custom that some who are still children should honour the goddess in the procession. These are dressed in white, and wear wreaths upon their heads. Their wreaths are woven of the flower called by the natives kosmosandalon, which, from its size and colour, seems to me to be an iris.32

Men and woman attended, as well as children. The procession was led not, or not only, by the priestess of Demeter, but, by the sound of it, by all the local dignitaries. It also welcomed those from outside the region.33 In other words: this was a highly inclusive cult. It is worth noting that the flower called kosmosandalon seems to have been native to the area, since Pausanias found it unfamiliar and thinks it necessary to draw a comparison to the more familiar iris (ὑάκινθον) for his readers.34 In contrast to the public procession, next came the secluded part of the ritual. Men brought a cow, still untamed and frisky (ὑβρίζουσαν ἔτι ὑπὸ ἀγριότητος), to the temple, and drove it inside, and closed the doors.35 Inside, four old women armed with sickles awaited the cow, and ‘whichever gets the chance’ cut its throat.36 Three more cows were driven in, one by one, and dispatched in the same way, and it was a requirement that each fall on the same side as did the first cow. Pausanias further notes that the thing that they worship most of all is kept secret, and only the old women know what it is: αὐτὸ δὲ ὃ σέβουσιν ἐπὶ πλέον ἢ τἄλλα, ἐγὼ μὲν οὐκ εἶδον, οὐ μὴν οὐδὲ ἀνὴρ ἄλλος οὔτε ξένος οὔτε Ἑρμιονέων αὐτῶν· μόναι δὲ ὁποῖόν τί ἐστιν αἱ γρᾶες ἴστωσαν, ‘But the thing itself that they worship more than all else, I never saw, nor yet has any other man, whether stranger or Hermionian. The old women may keep their knowledge of its nature to themselves’.37 Pausanias has nothing further to say of this unrevealed thing, and it is not his habit to speculate about the identity of such objects through comparison with rituals from other places; the heart of the rite, then, remains unknown. What we can say is that this rite progresses along

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Paus. 2.35.5, transl. W. H. S. Jones (Cambridge, MA, 1918). Presbeutai from Asine: Syll.3 1051 = IG IV 679; Perlman 2000: 163. Kosmosandalon is a rare word. A search in TLG finds only six instances of the word and its cognates, including Pausanias’. Four are derived from Ath. 681b–c, 685a–c, three from Old Comedy (Pherekrates Per. F 138, Aga. F 2 K.-A.; Kratinos F 105 K.-A.) and one from the 4thcentury BCE philosopher Klearchos (F 39 Wehrli). The last is from Poll. Onom. 6.107, drawing on Kratinos. All refer to its use in wreaths, usually in a list with many other flowers. 36 37 Paus. 2.35.6. Paus. 2.35.7. Paus. 2.35.8.

Demeter Chthonia at Hermione

a spectrum from something very open and widely accessible to something more restricted to something entirely private. Many of the features of the ritual are unusual, to say the least: the old women as sacrificers, the sacrifice inside the temple, the sickles. It does appear to be, as Jan Bremmer notes, a ritual which overturns many of the normal rules.38 Dealing with a frisky cow inside a confined space with sickles, particularly if the floor was slippery with blood, cannot have been easy for the old women involved. While it is true that their place in society makes them more eligible to enact this role than younger women would be, the fact remains that as women they ought not to be the sacrificers at all.39 The ritual Pausanias describes is sufficiently unique that we cannot say for certain why it takes the form it does, or what it is meant to achieve. Many of the elements are ambiguous: sickles, for example, are used in the harvest, and may be dedications, but they are also the mythical weapon of choice against monsters and, occasionally, gods.40 Our only other source, Aristokles, mentions Demeter as Δάματερ πολύκαρπε, ‘Demeter of many fruits’, and asks her to ‘be gracious, and may every farm in Hermione flourish in all ways’ (ἵλαος εἴης, καὶ πάντως θάλλοι κλᾶρος ἐν ῾Ερμιόνηι).41 Accordingly, Vivienne Pirenne-Delforge and others see the cult as agricultural, citing the sickles in support.42 It does, after all, take place in summer, near harvest time, and Demeter is the goddess of the harvest. Sarah Iles Johnston takes a far more open approach, seeing it as a ritual which draws on the myth of Hades and Persephone, and addresses a series of concerns around agricultural prosperity and female maturation.43 If she is correct about the link between Demeter and female maturation, then we can perhaps see Demeter here taking over a role more commonly associated with Hera in the central Argolid. Paula Perlman suggests that the ritual was, or included, a mystery cult, a Hellenistic rival to the Eleusinian Mysteries, with which it shared some of the same quirks of open access with a closed central rite; she sees it, like the Mysteries, as offering both eschatological and agrarian benefits.44

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Bremmer 1987: 199. Detienne 1989: 141–43. Cf. Dillon 2002: 115–16, 245, who does not see it as ritual inversion. E.g. Perseus uses a sickle against Medusa, Apollod. Bibl. 2.4.2, and Herakles against the Hydra, Eur. Ion 192; both of these heroes also wield it on many Attic vases. Zeus against Typhon, Apollod. Bibl. 1.6.3; Cronus against Ouranos, Hes. Theog. 162. West 1966: 217–18; Johnston 2012: 217, 221. Aristokles BNJ 436 F 2 (Ael. NA 11.4). 43 Pirenne-Delforge 2008: 204–06; Johnston 2012: 221. Johnston 2012. Perlman 2000: 161–66.

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In order to better understand the ritual we need to consider its local context: that is, the distinctive elements of the cult that are specific to Hermione in terms of the polis’ mythical, topographical, and cultic landscapes. Pausanias tells us not only about the ritual involved, but also a little about the topography and other deities who have cults alongside that of Demeter.45 Demeter was not the only goddess worshipped here. Lasus’ hymn to Demeter associated her with Kore and Klymenos: Δάματρα μέλπω Κόραν τε Κλυμένοι ἄλοχον, ‘I sing of Demeter and Kore, wife of Klymenos’.46 Pausanias records a temple of Klymenos opposite that of Demeter, and identifies the name as an epiclesis of Hades (as Lasus did implicitly by identifying Klymenos as Kore’s husband): ἔστι δὲ καὶ ἄλλος ναός: εἰκόνες δὲ περὶ πάντα ἑστήκασιν αὐτόν. οὗτος ὁ ναός ἐστιν ἀπαντικρὺ τοῦ τῆς Χθονίας, καλεῖται δὲ Κλυμένου, καὶ τῷ Κλυμένῳ θύουσιν ἐνταῦθα. Κλύμενον δὲ οὐκ ἄνδρα Ἀργεῖον ἐλθεῖν ἔγωγε ἐς Ἑρμιόνα ἡγοῦμαι, τοῦ θεοῦ δέ ἐστιν ἐπίκλησις, ὅντινα ἔχει λόγος βασιλέα ὑπὸ γῆν εἶναι . . . ὄπισθεν δὲ τοῦ ναοῦ τῆς Χθονίας χωρία ἐστὶν ἃ καλοῦσιν Ἑρμιονεῖς τὸ μὲν Κλυμένου, τὸ δὲ Πλούτωνος, τὸ τρίτον δὲ αὐτῶν λίμνην Ἀχερουσίαν. περιείργεται μὲν δὴ πάντα θριγκοῖς λίθων, ἐν δὲ τῷ τοῦ Κλυμένου καὶ γῆς χάσμα: διὰ τούτου δὲ Ἡρακλῆς ἀνῆγε τοῦ Ἅιδου τὸν κύνα κατὰ τὰ λεγόμενα ὑπὸ Ἑρμιονέων. There is also another temple, all round which stand statues. This temple is right opposite that of Chthonia, and is called that of Clymenus, and they sacrifice to Clymenus here. I do not believe that Clymenus was an Argive who came to Hermion; ‘Clymenus’ is the surname of the god, whoever legend says is king in the underworld . . . Behind the temple of Chthonia are three places which the Hermionians call that of Clymenus, that of Pluto, and the Acherusian Lake. All are surrounded by fences of stones, while in the place of Clymenus there is also a chasm in the earth. Through this, according to the legend of the Hermionians, Herakles brought up the Hound of Hell.47

This is borne out by dedications from Hermione, inscribed, like Lasus’ hymn, to Demeter, Klymenos and Kore.48 Klymenos also has one of three ‘places’, chōria, surrounded by a stone wall; another is called the Acherousian Lake (named after a mythical lake in the underworld). And the other one is that of Plouton. This is another name for Hades, but it is the name given to the god in his guise as a god of agricultural prosperity. The stone walls make these sound as if they might be abata, sacred places 45 48

Paus. 2.35.4–10. IG IV.686–91, 1609.

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Lasus F 702 PMG, transl. D. A. Campbell.

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Paus. 2.35.9–10.

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in which it is forbidden to set foot, although Pausanias does not specify this. But given the mythically threatening nature of the ‘places’, prohibiting access to them is a likely response. While Demeter cult is common throughout the eastern Argolid, the cult of Hades (under any name) is exceedingly rare, and the cult under the name of Klymenos is, so far as we know, unique.49 In considering this imaginary landscape, we recall that Hermione is known as a place with close links to the underworld. Strabo says that the Hermionians are buried without a coin for Charon, since they have a shortcut to Hades.50 It was also the people of Hermione alone who, according to Apollodoros, were able to tell Demeter that Hades had taken her daughter.51 The natural landscape is also in play here; the Pron is arid and stony. Pausanias notes that the ‘place’ of Klymenos has a chasm in it, probably a natural limestone fissure.52 Through this, the Hermionians told Pausanias, Herakles brought Kerberos up; Euripides adds that Herakles left Kerberos in the precinct of Demeter Chthonia while he went to visit his family.53 The Hermionians, it seems, are uniquely placed to be able to care for Hades’ hound. At Hermione, then, these ties to the underworld are not only strong but also celebrated. The placement of the sanctuary outside of the polis is not only appropriate for Demeter, as noted above, but also fits specific topographical features within the sanctuary, and distances potentially dangerous cult sites for underworld figures from the polis. All of this indicates that if we are trying to figure out the function of the goddess’ cult at Hermione, we should take into account that her cult was sited in a locality which boasted – literally boasted – strong affiliations to the underworld, and, furthermore, that she was worshipped in conjunction with Kore and Klymenos, that is, Hades. More specifically, both the natural and mythical landscapes are focused on the passage to the underworld, which physically exists and is rendered meaningful and real by its mythological landscape. This makes an eschatological function for the cult very likely. The cult both celebrates the exceptional local connection to the underworld and mitigates the danger posed by such a connection by its control over the physical and ritual landscapes.54 Pausanias notes that the former city of Hermione, on the headland four stades away from its later site, has a cult site used for the mysteries of Demeter: καὶ περίβολοι μεγάλων λίθων λογάδων εἰσίν, ἐντὸς δὲ αὐτῶν ἱερὰ δρῶσιν ἀπόρρητα Δήμητρι, ‘There are also circuits of large unhewn stones, 49 51

50 On cults of Hades see Burton 2018. Strabo 8.6.12; Callim. F 278, see Pfeiffer 1949 ad loc. 52 53 54 Apollod. Bibl. 1.5.1. Paus. 2.35.10. Eur. Her. 614–15. Scheer 2019: 25–26.

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within which they perform mystic ritual to Demeter’.55 Perlman suggests that the rituals in the stone circles are part of the same cult of Demeter Chthonia, related to the stone chōria in the Chthonia Sanctuary, but this seems tenuous given that separate rites were still performed within them at the time of Pausanias’ visit; the ‘places’ in the Chthonia Sanctuary have not superseded them, and none of the latter are for Demeter.56 Given the distinction Pausanias makes between the two areas, plus the fact that there are other cults of Demeter in the area, it seems more likely that they are not related. Topography also separates them: the stone circles lie below, on the headland near the Temple of Poseidon, whereas the chōria are part of the large extraurban complex on the hill above the town. The close association between the deities in the Chthonia Sanctuary also makes it clear that the different elements within it are conceived as closely integrated with each other. Also in the sanctuary, but the object of much less scholarly attention, was a temple of Ares. Pausanias gives us no information about this temple other than the fact that it was there and had an image of the god in it.57 A Severan inscription furnishes us with the epithet Enyalios.58 It is of course possible that the presence of Ares was not related to the other deities worshipped in the sanctuary, a phenomenon that is not unknown in large sanctuaries, but it is tempting nonetheless to think otherwise in view of the integration of the other cult sites in this sanctuary. Early scholars argued that Ares had a connection to the underworld, but there is no evidence for this.59 Ares by himself is rare in cult (more often he shares with Aphrodite); Pausanias lists six cult sites exclusively for Ares, and for four of them he offers a local event or myth to explain their founding.60 Unfortunately Hermione is one of the two he leaves unexplained, but we can cautiously infer that Ares is not a god for whom you build a temple without a good reason. We simply do not know what that reason might be. The sanctuary was founded, according to Pausanias’ 55 56

57 59

60

Paus. 2.34.10. Perlman 2000: 164–65. Her discussion does show a link with a local version of the rape of Persephone, but that need not indicate a mystery cult. 58 Paus. 2.35.10. IG IV.717 (pace Jameson 2004: 181 who mistakenly cites IG IV.772). E.g. Kern 1938: 1.38–40: ‘Kriegsgottheiten sind fast immer unterirdische Wesen, die die Schrecken der Vernichtung und des Todes personifizieren.’ Arnold 1934 notes both the theory and some of the problems with it. Paus. 2.35.10 (Hermione); 2.32.9 (Troizēn, where Theseus conquered Amazons); 3.22.6 (Geronthrae); 3.19.7 (Sparta; Ares Theritas after Thero his nurse, or θήρ, ‘wild beast’); 8.44.7–8 (Ares Aphneios, where Aerope bore Ares a son); 8.48.4–5 (Tegea, where the women fought off an army). See also Enyalios at 3.15.7 (Sparta, in chains so he will not flee).

Demeter Chthonia at Hermione

sources, in an act of violence: the Argives associate the founding of the cult with a woman called Chthonia, daughter of one Kolontas, who failed to extend a welcome to Demeter when she came to Argolis.61 Kolontas was punished for his lack of respect by being burnt in his house, while his more sensible daughter founded the Chthonia. It is tempting to link this local myth to the presence of Ares, but this would be too much of a stretch – particularly since this is a version given by outsiders, which differs from the version of the sanctuary’s founding given by the Hermionians themselves. In the latter, the sanctuary is founded by Chthonia and her brother Klymenos without any mention of violence. If we follow this local version, the underworld becomes a less dominant part of the scene, since Klymenos is demoted from god of the underworld to founder-hero. But the underworld is still very much part of the landscape. It is intriguing that the evidence, such as it is, tends to support Pausanias’ identification of Klymenos as Hades over his local informant’s identification of the founder-hero. The informant’s assertion about the identity of Klymenos is undermined by the gateway to the underworld in Klymenos’ ‘place’ and by the linking of Klymenos’ name with Kore’s in Lasus’ hymn and in the dedications found at the sanctuary. Perhaps casting Klymenos as the founder of Hermione provides yet another way to identify the town with the underworld, even if Pausanias or his informant fail to make the link explicit. And none of this is fixed: by the time Pausanias visited, the cult had been in place for about 700 years, and had no doubt undergone a number of changes in that time. Pausanias himself implies that the children are a recent addition to the procession: ‘it is now a custom’ (καθέστηκεν ἤδη) for them to be present.62 This raises the question of the extent to which we can draw on Pausanias’ account to reconstruct a plausible, locally based understanding of the sanctuary. There is a sense in which Pausanias unquestionably offers us a localised account. He describes in detail a sanctuary and ritual that is unique to this area, with emphasis on distinctive features of both action and topography, citing the Hermionians’ accounts of their ritual. And it is true that by virtue of his interests Pausanias naturally integrates local descriptions and interpretations into his writing. In doing so, he also gives us an insight into what the Hermionians of his own time considered to be important about this site. Yet his choices throughout his writings are made according to τὰ δὲ μάλιστα ἄξια μνήμης, ‘what is worth remembering’,

61

Paus. 2.35.4.

62

Paus. 2.35.5.

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ἀποκρῖναι τὰ ἀξιολογώτατα, ‘to judge what is most worthy of note’.63 The Sanctuary of Demeter Chthonia is introduced by saying it is ‘the object most worthy of mention’ (τὸ δὲ λόγου μάλιστα ἄξιον ἱερὸν Δήμητρός), with which the Hermionians would likely agree; yet the principles which guide those choices are not local, or at least not local to Hermione.64 Pausanias also includes theories of his own. As we have seen he disagrees with his guide about the role of Klymenos. In addition, the wreaths the children wear are woven of a flower the Hermionians call kosmosandalon, which Pausanias identifies as an iris (ὑάκινθον ἐμοὶ δοκεῖν ὄντα), and accordingly links to mourning.65 And Pausanias does not tell us what he is leaving out, nor does he give very clear physical or temporal markers for what he is including in his account. Although geographical features play an important role in his account of Demeter’s sanctuary, their topography only matters insofar as they shed light on relationships between the deities. So the fact that Klymenos’ temple is ‘right opposite’ Demeter’s is included because it tells us (or Pausanias) something important about the relationship between the two, not because Pausanias is concerned to make the layout of the sanctuary clear. In sum, Pausanias lays his own reading of the cult over the local landscape, and not all of his interpretation is derived from his local guides. The festival was important to the town of Hermione over a long period of time: from the turn of the fifth century BCE there survive four statue bases dedicated to the goddess which held statues of cows, evoking the festival’s central ritual, and from the Roman period we have a series of coins showing a man leading a cow on a rope.66 These significant markers show that it was not only a local festival, but one with status beyond the eastern Argolid: it attracted visitors from elsewhere in the Argolid – Asine sent ambassadors (presbeutai) to perform a sacrifice at it (and likely other poleis did likewise) – and was known as far off as Sicily – Demeter was given the epiclesis ‘Hermione’ in Syracuse.67 The core ritual of the festival 63 65

66

67

64 Paus. 3.11.1. Paus. 2.35.4. κοσμοσάνδαλον: 2.35.5; see also Prauscello 2011: 22 for the potentially chthonian nature of the flowers and white clothing. The ὑάκινθος (most likely iris or larkspur) was named for the flower Apollo created in mourning for Hyacinthus; Paus. refers to this myth at 3.19.5, 1.35.4. It was one of the flowers Persephone was picking before Hades abducted her: Hom. Hymn Dem. 7, see Richardson 1974 ad loc. Statue bases: IG IV 683; IG IV 684; Marcadé 1949: 537, fig. 18; Jameson 1953: 150, no. 3, pl. 50. Discussion: Jameson 1953: 148–54. Coins: Imhoof-Blumer and Gardner 1964: M III; BCD Pelop. 1308. Asine: Syll.3 1051 = IG IV 679; Perlman 2000: 163. Sicily: Hsch. s.v. Hermione; Albertum and Schmidt 1965: 193, no. 75.

Demeter Chthonia at Hermione

also features in a fragment by an otherwise unknown author called Aristokles, cited by Aelian.68 This is our only other description of the rite, but it gives us a very different picture: the old woman is still there, but the frisky cow has miraculously become a placid bull, and the sickles are nowhere to be seen. This is most likely a fragment of an aretology, a genre of writing recording miraculous one-off events brought about by the gods; so it does not record the normal ritual, but some variant of it brought about by divine intervention when something went wrong.69 What this does tell us, however, is that the festival was of sufficient status and interest to attract this kind of story. It is clear from the stories about the founding as well as the name of the goddess herself that the epiclesis Chthonia is integral to the identity of the site. Chthonia is a particularly interesting cult epithet, firstly, because its meaning is clear (we know what Chthonia means, unlike many epicleseis of obscure origin; it comes from the word χθών, ‘earth’) and secondly, because it is not clear at all: as an epiclesis, its meaning carries with it the ambiguity of the original word, and it is thus concerned with a range of meanings around the dead, the underworld, and agriculture. The application of these meanings varies depending on the god to whom it is attached. So Hermes Chthonios is connected solely and explicitly with the dead, a god who oversees passages between the dead and the living, sometimes friendly (in epitaphs, for example) and sometimes less so (in curse tablets).70 He has no connection with agriculture. This, then, is a god whose remit is focused and changes little from place to place, a god whose base function, escorting the dead, is not dependent on local topography – although the local expression of that function may change. Zeus Chthonios, on the other hand, seems primarily a god of agriculture as far as cult is concerned, even if poets like to link him to the underworld.71

68 69

70

71

Aristokles BNJ 436 F 2 (Ael. NA 11.4). A. Henrichs, unpublished, cited in Johnston 2012: 222–24. Cf. A. Mori’s commentary ad BNJ 436 F 2, suggesting that Aristokles may be referring to a different festival altogether; and in contrast Detienne 1989: 141, who conflates the two. Friendly: e.g. funerary epitaphs from Thessaly, IG IX, 2 814, 984, 1004, 1005, 1316; I.Thess. I 11; SEG 33.468, 35.660, 42.502, 43.264. Unfriendly: curse tablets from Attica, IG III App. 91, 93, 105, 107; Def. tab. Audollent 52, 69. See also Sourvinou-Inwood 1995: 304–07, 314; Parker 2005: 294–96 (Anthesteria). Hes. Op. 465–68: prayers to Zeus Chthonios and Demeter for the ripening of the grain. See also Aesch. Suppl. 689–91. Underworld: Hom. Il. 9.453–57; Soph. OC 1606; Aesch. Ag. 1385–87. These passages have influenced scholars’ readings of the Hesiod passage: see Johnston 2012: 214; West 1966 ad Hes. Op. 465.

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Of course chthonios can and often does carry more than one of its meanings at a time. In cult, a worshipper needs to choose the correct epiclesis in order to get what he needs. But even in cult there is room for a play on the possible meanings of chthonios: both to do with the underworld and with the earth. When Herodotus describes Demeter and Kore as Chthoniai theai, in passing and without further explanation, either association, or both, could be apposite.72 For a goddess such as Kore, who so clearly is Chthonia in both senses of the word, the broad scope of the title fits perfectly. The dead and the underworld do have an association with agricultural growth; the word chthonios is capable of neatly encapsulating it.73

Demeter Chthonia Outside of Hermione The cult of Demeter Chthonia at Hermione was not solely a local cult. It attracted visitors from outside, and gave rise to satellite cults elsewhere. Since the epithet Chthonia is only rarely applied to Demeter, it is possible to trace the cult’s influence and look at the way in which it changes when imported into other locales. To what extent, in other words, is the cult of a goddess who is worshipped in more than one place influenced by attention to local factors? She must be recognisably the same goddess, and yet can hardly remain unaffected by the local ‘landscapes’ as defined above. Two other known cults of Demeter Chthonia existed. One was in Sparta, known only from Pausanias.74 Pausanias thinks it was probably adopted from the cult at Hermione, whether simply because of the name of the goddess or on other grounds we do not know. The Spartans told him it was handed down to them by Orpheus. Since there is no indication of any recorded connection with Orpheus at Hermione, this likely indicates some degree of local divergence at Sparta, whether deliberate or not. Even if the cult at Hermione was the parent cult, the Spartans did not feel it necessary to copy it in exact detail. On the other hand, the presence of Orpheus does indicate the same kind of connection to the underworld that existed at Hermione, since Orpheus only ever founds eschatological cults. Also likely 72 73

74

Hdt. 6.134, 7.153. Made specific in only one case: Hippoc. Vict. 4.92: ἀπὸ γὰρ τῶν ἀποθανόντων αἱ τροφαὶ καὶ αὐξήσιες καὶ σπέρματα γίνεται, ‘from the dead come nourishment: growth and seed’; see also Ar. Tag. F 504.14. Daraki 1985: 50–58; Burkert 1985: 200–01. Paus. 3.14.5.

Demeter Chthonia at Hermione

to be burial-related is the society of thoinatai, banqueters, in Kallatis (what is now Romania), certainly by the first century BCE, much less certainly as early as the fourth.75 If this is a burial ‘club’, then here we can catch a glimpse of the cult changing to fit the demands of a different human landscape. Even with the little we know about these cults, it seems likely that they shared common ground and yet functioned differently from each other, shifting within the cult framework established at Hermione to accommodate local needs and requirements. Next, two outliers: not actual cults, but still appeals to the goddess in religious contexts. Demeter Chthonia appears on a puzzling gold leaf from Pherai, a passport to the underworld: ‘Send me to the thiasoi of the mystai: I have the ritual objects (ὄργια) of [Bacchios] and the rites (τέλη) of Demeter Chthonia and of the Mountain Mother.’76 This Demeter is unique, both in her appearance and in her cult association with the Mountain Mother.77 But the eschatological link is familiar enough. Even stranger is a curse tablet from southern Russia, which evokes Demeter Chthonia alongside Hermes Chthonios, Hekate Chthonia, Plouton Chthonios, Leukothea Chthonia, Persephone Chthonia, and the ἥρωας χθονίους – and Artemis Strophaia, Artemis ‘who stands at the door’, whose job it presumably is to act as doorkeeper for all the chthonioi.78 This wholesale and slightly random grab-bag of chthonioi probably says more about the curser’s determination to cover all their bases than about the actual nature of any cult of the gods who are meant to carry it out. Demeter is, again, keeping slightly odd company here; apart from Artemis and the (so far as I know) unique Leukothea Chthonia, the others all owe their presence to their roles as underworld deities. It may be that, for both this curse tablet and the lamella from Pherai, Demeter owes her inclusion to the fame of her epiclesis, rather than to any detailed awareness of her actual cult function on the part of the composers. Both curse tablets and gold leaves allow for a certain amount of individual variation, and maybe even encourage it, as an individual practitioner might use a point of difference in order to demonstrate his authority. In other words, while the writer may know the name of the goddess, he is not necessarily aware of the function of her cult.

75 76 77 78

IScM III, nos. 40, 48b; on the dating see Parker and Stamatopoulou 2004: 12. Parker and Stamatopoulou 2004; Graf and Johnston 2007: no. 28. Parker and Stamatopoulou 2004; Bernabé 2008. From Pantikapion (Kerch), undated. Jordan 1985: 195, no. 170.

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Let me conclude this quick tour of Demeters with the two poetic references to Demeter Chthonia. At Hermione, as we have seen, the goddess is defined by the company she keeps. In contrast, the poet Nicarchus offers an epigram to Pan Aigibate, ‘the goat-treader’, Dionysos Eukarpo, ‘the giver of good fruit’, and Demeter Chthonia for fine flocks, good wine, and a good harvest.79 And Demeter Chthonia is cited in Apollonius as the goddess who taught the Titans to harvest the bountiful grain, and the island of Corcyra is known as ‘Drepanē’ (‘Sickle’) after the instrument which she taught them to use.80 Apollonius also offers an alternative for the name of the island, that it is derived from the sickle with which the god Cronus castrated his father. The parallels are all the stronger because the sickle (δρεπάνη) is the tool used by the old women to sacrifice the cows at Hermione. These are agricultural references, the first straightforwardly so, the second perhaps less so. It is of course possible to argue that literary compositions need not draw on cult epicleseis for their meaning; but, particularly for Apollonius, an erudite writer with a fascination with intertextuality, I find it more likely that he was deliberately evoking the cult at Hermione. We can see from all of this, firstly, that cults of Demeter Chthonia have common ground in their association with the underworld, and secondly, that she appears to work differently in each place she has a cult. There is not much in common, so far as we can tell, between the cult at Hermione and the thoinatai at Kallatis. Conversely, literary references to Demeter Chthonia have common ground in their agrarian interests. Outside of Hermione, the evidence for an agricultural link in Demeter Chthonia’s cults is more tenuous (it seems particularly unlikely for the burial club in Kallatis), although the evidence is so scrappy that we cannot assume it was not there. To come back to Hermione, then, we are left with a harvest cult in an underworld setting with a ritual whose meaning cannot be certainly identified: in sum, a cult that combines agricultural and eschatological aspects, and perhaps other meanings as well. We might tentatively compare the cult at Eleusis, which has a similar mix of agrarian divinities with specifically underworld deities, since alongside Demeter are worshipped Kore and Plouton, as agrarian deities, but also Theos and Thea, as their underworld avatars.81 Demeter’s role at Hermione, however, seems less purely agrarian than at Eleusis: it is safest to infer that Demeter at Hermione is Chthonia in 79 81

80 AP 6.31 = Nicharchos IV in Gow/Page HE. Ap. Rhod. Argon. 4.986–90. Clinton 1992: 51–53, 114–15; Parker 2005: 335–37.

Demeter Chthonia at Hermione

both the agricultural and underworld senses of the word. Later avatars, however, seem to lack the complexity of their parent cult, picking up on one or the other of these aspects rather than on both. What is clear is that the cult is deeply rooted in its local ‘landscapes’. The topography of the natural landscape – the rise of the hill that sets the sanctuary outside the city, but not far outside; the chasm in the rock that is part of Klymenos’ ‘place’ – combines with the mythical connection between the Hermionians and the underworld and the built landscape of the sanctuary to create a distinctive reflection of closely focused local identity not shared even with the other poleis in the eastern Argolid. This was no doubt reinforced by the unusual form of the ritual, and by the secret, unknowable object at its heart. Not all of those landscapes are visible to us: ultimately, it is impossible to tell why the ritual took the highly idiosyncratic form that it did. On a broader view, the sanctuary also reflects the regional pre-eminence of Demeter. Even though its connections with the underworld may be derived from strictly Hermionian beliefs, rather than those of the eastern Argolid or even the Hermionian chōra, it was also a harvest festival, and it welcomed participants from outside the community even as it celebrated those inside it. And more broadly again, the festival was, arguably, the most important in the eastern Argolid. It seems to have been the only one to gain attention outside of the Argolid.82 It is not surprising to find that the festival that is best known in the world beyond the eastern Argolid belongs to the cult of the most important goddess in this region. It is a cult which simultaneously opens up Hermione to the outside world, of which it is a part, while strongly marking local identity and its differences from that wider world. The case of the cult of Demeter Chthonia at Hermione clearly demonstrates the polymorphous nature of localisation in Greek religion. Cults that are nominally the same – that is, cults in honour of the same deity, with the same epiclesis – can and do change significantly according to the needs of the local community. A core of similarity may remain; all cults of Demeter Chthonia have a link to the underworld. But the way in which each serves its community is significantly different. Consideration of the local dimension is therefore essential to our understanding of any given cult, and of the ways in which individual cults relate to each other, how they relate to the general divine persona of a particular deity, and how they fit into the network of Greek religion as a whole. Having said that, the 82

See above on ambassadors to the cult from Asine, reference to it in Syracuse, and a cult derived from it in Sparta.

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specific and identifiable features of the landscapes – whether physical, human, or imaginary – that shape a local cult are very diverse. Only some of them are visible to us, and the balance between them varies from cult to cult depending on the nature of the cult itself and the evidence available to us. Even the geographical scope of ‘local’ needs to be considered at more than one level – polis, chōra, region – in order to fully understand the function of a particular cult. It is therefore almost impossible to offer a fulsome definition of what localism is, as applied to cult, since any definition that encompasses all the variants is likely to be so general that it ceases to be a useful theoretical tool – a not uncommon problem in Greek religion. The study of the local dimension of Greek religion, I would suggest, is at its strongest when it is flexible and open-ended. Bibliography Albertum, J. and M. Schmidt (eds.) (1965) Hesychii Alexandrini Lexicon II. Amsterdam. Arnold, I. R. (1934) ‘Ares in Coronea’, The Journal of Hellenic Studies 54, 206–07. BCD Peloponnesos = LHS Numismatics (2006) Coins of Peloponnesos. The BCD Collection. Auction catalog 96, 8–9 May 2006. Zurich. Beck, H. (2020) Localism and the Ancient Greek City-State. Chicago, Ill. Béquignon, Y. (1958) ‘Démetér, déesse acropolitaine’, Révue Archaeologique 2, 149–77. Bernabé, A. (2008) ‘Some Thoughts about the “New” Gold Tablet from Pherai’, Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 166, 53–58. Bintliff, J. L. (2006) ‘City–Country Relationships in the “Normal Polis”’, in R. Rosen and I. Sluiter (eds.) City, Countryside, and the Spatial Organization of Value in Classical Antiquity. Leiden, 13–32. Bremmer, J. N. (1987) ‘The Old Women of Ancient Greece’, in J. Blok and P. Mason (eds.) Sexual Asymmetry. Amsterdam, 191–215. Burkert, W. (1985) Greek Religion. Oxford. Burton, D. (2018) ‘Worshipping Hades: Myth and Cult in Elis and Triphylia’, Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 20(1), 211–27. Clinton, K. (1992) Myth and Cult: The Iconography of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Stockholm. Cole, S. G. (1994) ‘Demeter in the Ancient Greek City and its Countryside’, in S. E. Alcock and R. Osborne (eds.) Placing the Gods: Sanctuaries and Sacred Space in Ancient Greece. Oxford, 199–216. (2004) Landscapes, Gender and Ritual Space: The Ancient Greek Experience. Los Angeles, Calif. Daraki, M. (1985) Dionysos. Paris.

Demeter Chthonia at Hermione Detienne, M. (1989) ‘The Violence of Wellborn Ladies’, in M. Detienne and J.P. Vernant (eds.) The Cuisine of Sacrifice among the Greeks. Chicago, Ill., 129–47. Dillon, M. (2002) Girls and Women in Classical Greek Religion. London. Fraenkel, E. (1950) Aeschylus Agamemnon. Oxford. Graf, F. and S. I. Johnston (2007) Ritual Texts for the Afterlife. London. Hall, J. (1997) Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity. Cambridge. Hamilton, R. (1992) Choes & Anthesteria. Ann Arbor, Mich. Head, B. V. (1911) Historia Numorum. Oxford. Imhoof-Blumer, F. W. and P. Gardner (1964) Ancient Coins Illustrating Lost Masterpieces of Greek Art: A Numismatic Commentary on Pausanias. Chicago, Ill. Jameson, M. H. (1953) ‘Inscriptions of the Peloponnese’, Hesperia 28, 148–71. (2004) ‘Mapping Greek Cults’, in F. Kolb (ed.) Chora und Polis. Munich, 147–83. Jameson, M. H., C. N. Runnels, and T. van Andel (1994) A Greek Countryside. The Southern Argolid from Prehistory to the Present Day. Stanford, Calif. Johnston, S. I. (2012) ‘Demeter in Hermione: Sacrifice and Ritual Polyvalence’, Arethusa 45, 211–41. Jordan, D. R. (1985) ‘A Survey of Greek Defixiones Not Included in the Special Corpora’, Greek, Roman, & Byzantine Studies 26, 151–97. Kern, O. (1938) Die Religion der Griechen. Berlin. Lightfoot, C. and C. Whitmore (2018) ‘Describing Hermion/Ermioni. Between Pausanias and Digital Maps, a Topology’, in M. Gillings, P. Hacigüzeller and G. Lock (eds.) Re-mapping Archaeology. London, 200–26. McHugh, M. (2017) The Ancient Greek Farmstead. Oxford. Marcadé, J. (1949) ‘Chronique des fouilles et découvertes archéologiques en Grèce en 1948. IIe partie: travaux de l’École Française: Péloponnèse’, Bulletin de correspondance hellénique 73, 537. Nabers, N. (1966) ‘Lead Tabellae from Morgantina’, American Journal of Archaeology 70, 67–68. (1979) ‘Ten Lead Tabellae from Morgantina’, American Journal of Archaeology 83, 463–64. Nilsson, M. P. (1967) Geschichte der griechischen Religion I, third ed. Munich. Parker, R. (2005) Polytheism and Society at Athens. Oxford. Parker, R. and M. Stamatopoulou (2004) ‘A New Funerary Gold Leaf from Pherai’, Archaiologike Ephemeris, 1–32. Perlman, P. (2000) City and Sanctuary in Ancient Greece: The Theorodokia in the Peloponnese. Göttingen. Pfeiffer, R. (1949) Callimachus. Volumen I: Fragmenta. Oxford. Pirenne-Delforge, V. (2008) Retour à la source: Pausanias et la religion grecque (Kernos Supplement 20). Liège.

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Polignac, F. de (1995) Cults, Territory, and the Origins of the Greek City-State. Chicago, Ill. Prauscello, L. (2011) ‘Μελίβοια: The Chthonia of Hermione and Kore’s Lost Epithet in Lasus fr. 702 PMG’, Classical Quarterly 61, 19–27. Richardson, N. J. (1974) The Homeric Hymn to Demeter. Oxford. Scheer, T. (2019) ‘Natur – Mythos – Religion im antiken Griechenland: Eine Einleitung’, in T. Scheer (ed.) Natur – Mythos – Religion im antiken Griechenland. Stuttgart, 13–28. Scullion, S. (1994) ‘Olympian and Chthonian’, Classical Antiquity 13, 75–119. Sourvinou-Inwood, C. (1995) Reading Greek Death. Oxford. West, M. L. (1966) Hesiod Theogony. Oxford. Winnington-Ingram, R. P. (1983) Studies in Aeschylus. Cambridge.

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Local Variation in the Thesmophoria Festival: A Case Study of the Attic and Sicilian Thesmophoria Festivals  . . 

With Katherine McLardy’s chapter, the focus shifts to a single festival that was celebrated in multiple places in the ancient Greek world: that of the Thesmophoria. The Thesmophoria were exclusive to women and celebrated in honour of the goddess Demeter and her daughter Persephone. The festival was aimed at promoting fertility and involved a number of rituals that established a link between sacrifice and the harvesting of agricultural produce. McLardy approaches this festival from a comparative perspective, investigating its manifestations at Attica and on Sicily. Through a careful analysis of similarities and differences in the celebrations at these two locations, she is able to show how the festival draws on local landscapes, myths, and histories. In highlighting the local horizon, McLardy takes issue with an approach that has focused merely on describing the general elements of the festival (at the price of everything else) and that has pieced them together in a composite account. In her contribution, local elements are more than mere deviations from a universal template that, as she points out, has always retained a certain artificial quality. Rather, such local dimensions of the Thesmophoria illustrate how Greek religion remained deeply embedded in the way people lived.

Introduction The Thesmophoria festival, held annually in honour of Demeter Thesmophoros and her daughter Kore-Persephone, was the most widely celebrated women’s festival in the ancient Greek world.1 The festival was already being celebrated by the seventh century BCE.2 Scholars argue that it began much earlier, with the most convincing arguments being based on 1 2

Already by Nilsson 1906: 313; more recently see e.g. Goff 2004: 125; Larson 2007: 70. Aen. Tact. 4.8–12. The text implies that the audience is probably already familiar with the general concept of the Thesmophoria festival.

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evidence relating to the Panhellenic spread of the festival and Demeter’s epithet Thesmophoros, which can already be observed at an early date.3 It continued to be celebrated well into the Roman period in some locations, and it has been presumed by scholars to have existed in roughly the same way throughout this large chronological and geographical scope. However, recent scholarship has shown a growing awareness of the amount of variation and diversity in the celebration of the Thesmophoria festival.4 As Sfameni Gasparro argues concerning Demetrian ritual: At the same time, the many ‘variables’ that this evidence displays in the different regions of the Greek and Hellenized world confirm the continuous adaptability of this sphere to local realities, differentiated over time and in their respective historico-cultural referents. More widely, they illuminate the flexibility of the religious model represented by Greek polytheism, in its peculiar dialectic between general structures of a panHellenic dimension and local ‘inventions’ linked to the various communities and relative traditions composing the variegated scenario of the peoples that saw themselves as Hellenes, due to community of language, customs and religious traditions.5

Two of the clearest examples of local variation within the celebration of the Thesmophoria festival are those of Attica and Sicily. Many other local Thesmophoria festivals survive to us only in one or two brief written mentions, or they have been surmised from archaeological remains but cannot be confirmed on the sole basis of material evidence. These examples can allow for the identification of discordant elements against common practice supported by widespread evidence, but do not allow for a more detailed reconstruction. Both Attica and Sicily have a greater variety of evidence, allowing for a more detailed exploration of localism in these contexts. Both locations offer a number of local Thesmophoria festivals within their general area, suitable for teasing out what can be reconstructed of these local interpretations of the Thesmophoria festival. Although it is not possible to fully reconstruct the festival as a complete ritual occasion, the evidence does speak to the importance of certain aspects within specific local contexts. In addition, due to the large amount of evidence, the modern reconstruction of the Athenian festival has often been extrapolated and applied to Thesmophoria festivals everywhere. I argue instead that local variation 3

4

For discussion on when the Thesmophoria festival was first instituted, see Simon 1983: 17; Burkert 1985: 13, 244–45; Clinton 1992: 29; Trümpy 2004; Stallsmith 2009: 28. 5 Sfameni Gasparro 2009: 142; see also Bremmer 2012: 28. Sfameni Gasparro 2009: 142.

Local Variation in the Thesmophoria Festival

must be taken into account and that we cannot elide these differences to produce a universal reconstruction of the festival. The issue here is primarily a modern academic one; scholars attempting to classify the festival and reconstruct it as fully as possible from incomplete evidence risk creating a monolithic template which no longer fits any specific local celebration of the festival. Moving away from the mere identification of similarities and differences between Thesmophoria festivals in different geographic and temporal locations, this paper explores the local context and how these local incarnations of the festival relate to the universal Thesmophoria festival familiar to scholarship from the literary sources. I argue, broadly, that such local variations made festivals such as the Thesmophoria more relevant to their local communities and thus served to have a greater impact on the lived experience of their female participants. The relationships between local variations and universal concept must be viewed as dynamic and prone to change over time and space. In this case study, the local dimension involves a focus on local cultural needs and conditions and how (if at all) these factors influence the composition of ritual elements within the Thesmophoria festival in different locations. This research is situated within a space that seeks to explore the lived experience of the women celebrating the Thesmophoria festival, arguing that the local dimension is of primary importance within the lives and worldviews of these women. Especially when considering femalecentric ritual, this is not a definition of local religion that draws particularly from the socio-political construct of the polis, but instead focuses on the reasons that may prompt groups of women to practise their local rites in specific ways, outside of male supervision/attention. In addition to the importance of the local religious landscape, the physical landscape informs the ways in which groups of women celebrated the Thesmophoria festival within their local contexts. A concrete example of this may be seen in the facilities provided for piglet sacrifice at various Demetrian sanctuaries – in some places, pre-existing caves may have been utilised, or clefts in the earth; in other places, man-made facilities were built. The lack of consistency in the design of these facilities points to the effect of the local environment in moulding the rites in honour of Demeter within specific local contexts.6 Within these conceptual boundaries, I investigate the relationship between the Panhellenic conception of the Thesmophoria festival and specific local celebrations of the Thesmophoria festival.

6

McLardy 2015.

207

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The ‘Universal’ Reconstruction of the Thesmophoria Festival In the academic literature, a Panhellenic view of the Thesmophoria festival has often been presented in the scholarship, with due acknowledgement that it is heavily biased to the Athenian context and with variations elsewhere briefly alluded to but not explored in detail.7 The modern scholarly reconstruction has been drawn together by scholars over a number of decades of scholarship from a variety of sources of widely different geographical and chronological contexts. This is problematic because it elides differences and fails to take into account the impact of local concerns upon the festival structure.8 As Sourvinou-Inwood argues (in relation to divine personalities rather than festivals): ‘Too often, in the study of Greek divinities, the local personality of a deity is overshadowed by the Panhellenic one and the individuality of the different local deities is ignored . . . The realities and needs of the worshipping groups differed while some were common to all and also operated at the Panhellenic level.’9 To a certain extent, this is a valid representation of the ancient Greek evidence for the Thesmophoria festival. The amount of literary and epigraphic evidence that refers to the Thesmophoria festival strongly implies that the ancient authors of these sources conceived of a distinct set of ritual activities that constituted a Thesmophoria festival. The fact that they rarely enumerate specific details can be linked to preserving the secrecy of the rites themselves which ancient authors considered paramount.10 Occasionally, as in Plutarch’s mention of the Thesmophoria festival in Eretria, an ancient author will pinpoint a variant practice associated with the Thesmophoria festival; this also indicates that there must have been an understanding of an ideal type of rites that were recognisable as ‘the’ Thesmophoria festival.11 There cannot be variations to a ritual practice unless there is an acknowledged normal way that this practice is carried out, although this does not necessarily presuppose a core set of ritual events that were common to every Thesmophoria festival. Following Wittgenstein’s theory of family resemblance, there could instead be a series of overlapping similarities between different local celebrations of the festival that constitute the concept of the Thesmophoria festival as a concrete 7

8

9

E.g. Dillon 2002: 110; Goff 2004: 125. This is not to say that these authors do not acknowledge variation, but that they focus on presenting a coherent picture of the rituals using Athenian evidence. In addition, as Parker 2007: 155 notes, it also fails to account for the experience of the actors within the festival or ritual. 10 11 Sourvinou-Inwood 1978: 101. E.g. Hdt. 2.171.2. Plut. Quaest. Graec. 31.

Local Variation in the Thesmophoria Festival

event.12 Therefore, it is necessary to identify a general pattern for these rites in order to have a firm basis on which to explore potential variation within local incarnations of the festival.

The Attic Thesmophoria Much of the traditional scholarly reconstruction of the Thesmophoria festival is based on Athenian evidence, as discussed above. It is, however, important to recognise that there is no evidence that the city of Athens itself was the originator of the Thesmophoria festival, nor was it necessarily representative of a prescriptive template for the festival.13 This is merely an illusion caused by the predominance of surviving evidence from Athens and the corresponding relative paucity of surviving evidence from other city-states. It is clear that in Athens the Thesmophoria festival was restricted to women. Two passages from Isaeus suggest that the wives of citizens played an important role, and a third passage indicates that slave women could not attend the festival.14 Aristophanes implies the women participating are all mothers, but does indicate that infants may have attended.15 Parts of his play suggest that slave women were allowed to attend, while others suggest they were excluded which may perhaps indicate that some rituals were restricted to a more select group of participants. Later, but still within the Athenian context, Menander has slave women or courtesans attending the Thesmophoria festival, and Lucian includes married women, maidens, and courtesans in his Thesmophoria festival.16 This evidence takes place over a long period of time, so may indicate a change in practice between different time periods. This is obviously problematic, as is the fact that much of the source material comes from dramatic contexts which were no doubt more concerned with the demands of narrative development than providing accurate information about the Thesmophoria festival. Scholars continue to express differing views about 12 13

14

15 16

Wittgenstein 1953. Hdt. 2.171.3; Plut. F 212 (Sandbach 1967); Diod. Sic. 1.96.4–5 all locate the origins of the festival as non-Greek. This need not be taken at face value, but shows a general trend in the ancient sources. Isae. 3.80; 6.49–50; 8.19. It is not clear that this means only married wives of citizens could attend, just that these women had more responsibility for the rites or perhaps more important ritual roles. Ar. Thesm. 181–88, 280–94, 329, 363, 607–08, 690–734. Men. Epit. 749–50; Luc. Dial. meret. 2.1.

209

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whether the women at the Thesmophoria were exclusively citizen-wives and mothers or not.17 While I agree that the evidence supports a prominent role for married citizen-wives in the Athenian Thesmophoria festival, it is inconclusive on whether slave women or other non-citizen women, and unmarried women, by reason of age or potentially profession, were invited to participate in the proceedings. The Athenian Thesmophoria festival took place over a three-day period in the month of Pyanopsion (October/November), which was the time of the sowing of the crops in Athens.18 The three days were called anodos, nēsteia, and kalligeneia.19 The women remained at the sanctuary for the duration of the festival.20 This requirement may be linked to the nocturnal rituals which are mentioned in some sources relating to the Athenian Thesmophoria festival.21 There is ample evidence that the women were engaged in fasting and mourning, sitting on the ground, for part of the festival.22 Although only one source mentions feasting, it is certainly plausible that a festival such as this would include feasting.23 Two specific prohibitions are both recorded in a single source each; that it was forbidden for the participants to eat pomegranate seeds if they had fallen to the ground, and that the participants were not allowed to wear floral crowns.24 A suggestion that prisoners were freed on the second day of the Athenian Thesmophoria festival is also supported by only one source.25 Associated with this point is an idea that business did not take place on the second day of the Thesmophoria, which is mentioned only in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae, a text whose utility for reconstructing the Thesmophoria festival is often debated, but nonetheless is often included in reconstructions.26 He says: ἐπεὶ νῦν γʼ οὔτε τὰ δικαστήρια / μέλλει δικάζειν οὔτε βουλῆς ἐσθʼ ἕδρα, / ἐπεὶ τρίτη ʹστὶ Θεσμοφορίων ἡ μέση (‘since 17

18 19

20 21 22

23 25 26

Objections of various strength to this view have been raised by Burkert 1985: 242; Winkler 1990: 194; Clinton 1992: 31–35; Brumfield 1999. The traditional view of a restriction to married women is upheld by Dillon 2002: 110; Parker 2007: 271; Dillon 2015: 250. Alciphr. Ep. 3.39; Plut. Dem. 30; Plut. De Is. et Os. 69; schol. Ar. Thesm. 80, 834; IG II2 674. Alciphr. Ep. 3.39; Ar. Thesm. 80; schol. Ar. Thesm. 80 (Dübner 1877). Two other sources may refer to Athens as these day names are recorded primarily for an Athenian context, but do not actually specify a location: Hsch. s.v. ἄνοδος (Latte Α5234); Phot. s.v. Θεσμοφορίων ἡμῆραι (Theodoridis Θ134). Schol. Ar. Thesm. 658. Ar. Thesm. 281, 372–76, 916–17, 1152; IG II2 1184 (from Cholargos). Ar. Av. 1519; Ar. Thesm. 947–49, 984; Ath. 307f; Plut. Dem. 30; Plut. De Is. et Os. 69; Suda s.v. Θεσμοφόρια (Adler Θ270). 24 Isae. 3.80. Clem. Al. Protr. 2.19.3; schol. Soph. O.C. 681. Walz, Rhet. Graec. IV 462. For this debate, see Zeitlin 1996: 375–416; Bobrick 1997: 182–88; Dillon 2002: 110.

Local Variation in the Thesmophoria Festival

now neither the dikastēria nor the boulē are passing judgements, as it is the middle of the Thesmophoria’).27 Chastity was required for at least some of the women celebrating the festival; a scholion to Lucian suggests that the women involved in a part of the ritual were required to remain chaste for three days.28 Pliny, in a discussion on the uses of herbs, suggests that chastity was a general requirement for all participants at the Thesmophoria festival.29 Most modern reconstructions include aischrologia, a practice of ritualised obscene jesting, in the Athenian Thesmophoria festival; however, the ancient evidence for this practice either does not specify a location or refers to places other than Athens specifically.30 Practices of obscene jesting are recorded for various Demetrian festivals and rituals, so it is not unlikely that this was a feature of the Athenian Thesmophoria festival, but the evidence is not sufficient to support this.31 It is clear that many of these elements seek their ritual justification within the myth of Demeter and Kore-Persephone. As Parker argues, ‘the myth of the rape and of Demeter’s quest was very likely often in the minds of participants, though the connection is not otherwise made explicit except in late antique sources’.32 For example, references to mourning and fasting provoke an obvious connection to Demeter’s grief at the loss of Persephone. Aischrologia suggests a connection to the breaking of this grief by either Iambe or Baubo, because in myth it is through obscene joking or sometimes lifting her skirts to reveal her genitals that Iambe/Baubo causes Demeter to laugh.33 Associations with torches and nocturnal rites likewise must have brought to mind Demeter searching for her lost daughter, torches in hand.34 The ritual pinnacle of the event is generally thought to be described in a scholion to Lucian’s Dialogi Meretricii, although the problematic nature of this source material is noted and has been thoroughly explored in scholarship.35 The text states that the Thesmophoria was a festival held in honour of Demeter and Kore. Piglets were thrown into pits called megara and then 27 30

31 32 33 34 35

28 29 Ar. Thesm. 78–80. Schol. Luc. Dial. meret. 2.1 (Rabe 1906). Pliny HN 24.59–64. Apollod. Bibl. 1.5.1 refers to the practice generally without defining a specific location; Diod. Sic. 5.4.7 refers to it in a Sicilian context. See Brumfield 1981; 1996; Halliwell 2008: 160–91 for further discussion. Parker 2007: 274. Hom. Hymn Dem. 197–204; Clem. Al. Protr. 20.2–21.2; Apollod. Bibl. 1.5.1; Diod. Sic. 5.4.7. Hom. Hymn Dem. 47–48, 61. Schol. Luc. Dial. meret. 2.1 (Rabe 1906); Clem. Al. Protr. 17.1. See Lowe 1998 as a start point for the discussion of the issues with the text itself. It is acknowledged as an important source for the key ritual of the Thesmophoria by Simon 1983: 19; Burkert 1985: 243; Dillon 2002: 114; Parker 2007: 272–73; and Stehle 2007: 169 amongst others.

211

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recovered by women, labelled antletriai or bailers, who had been chaste for three days. The things recovered from the pits, which included the piglet remains, dough models of phalli and snakes, and pine branches, were placed on altars to ensure a favourable harvest.36 The megara, or pits, into which the piglets were deposited are not described in any great detail, but were apparently guarded by snakes. The implication is probably that they were structures into which the women could descend, rather than merely holes in the ground. There is also evidence for the Thesmophoria festival in other Attic demes. There are a number of locations with clear evidence for worship of the Thesmophorian goddesses. For example, there was a Sanctuary of Demeter Thesmophoros and Kore at Halimous, and a Sanctuary of Demeter at Kolias; it is possible these may be one and the same.37 There was also a sanctuary specifically named as a thesmophorion in the epigraphic evidence near to the Piraeus.38 This may perhaps be identified with the Sanctuary of Demeter at Phaleron which was destroyed by the Persians.39 This thesmophorion was, according to the epigraphic sources, renting out portions of its land, suggesting that it was a well-endowed and prosperous sanctuary, which might be expected to have hosted its own Thesmophoria festival.40 The Thesmophoria festival in the deme of Halimus started on the tenth of Pyanopsion (October/November).41 This is a day earlier than the Thesmophoria festival is known to have started in central Athens.42 It is not very clear from the evidence whether this was a one-day festival, with the women from Halimus then journeying to central Athens to participate in the festival there as well, or whether the festival also went for multiple days in Halimus but started earlier. There is evidence for date variation between demes in relation to other festivals, so there is no compelling reason why the women from Halimus would need to travel to central Athens on the following day.43 Otherwise, it is a possibility that the women of Halimus enacted rituals that related to their own specific community on the tenth, before participating in the central rituals that addressed issues of wider concern to Attica. Plutarch speaks of women conducting sacrifices and dancing on the beach at Cape Kolias.44 It has been argued on 36

37

38 39 40 42

43

As Parker 2011: 198 notes, this is an unusually explicit explanation about the purpose of a festival. For Halimus, see Paus. 1.31.1; for Cape Kolias, see Plut. Sol. 8.4–6. Cronkite 1997: 387 argues that these are probably references to the same sanctuary. IG II3 1059; IG II2 1177. Paus. 10.35.2. See Cronkite 1997: 485 for identification with the sanctuary at Piraeus. 41 IG II3 1059; IG II2 1177. Schol. Ar. Thesm. 80 (Dübner 1877). Schol. Ar. Thesm. 80 (Dübner 1877). As this source discusses the dates both in central Athens and in Halimus, there is no issue in regard to the date shifting over time. 44 Whitehead 1986: 176–222; Clinton 1996: 112–20. Plut. Sol. 8.

Local Variation in the Thesmophoria Festival

geographical grounds that this was part of the Halimusian Thesmophoria festival, as Cape Kolias and Halimus are in close proximity to one another.45 It is, perhaps, interesting that Plutarch locates the action in a geographically bounded location, the beach, rather than hidden away within a sanctuary, although it is not clear whether this was a feature of the actual rites or a ruse on the part of the men in his story. Eleusis also presents an interesting example of a potential local Thesmophoria festival, as one of the earliest textual sources to mention the festival comes from here. The Thesmophoria festival at Eleusis is first mentioned by Aeneas Tacticus in the fourth century BCE.46 He describes a night attack by Megarians, stating: ὅτι οἱ ἐκ Μεγάρων οἱ ἐπιχειροῖεν ἀφικόμενοι πλοίοις ἐπιθέσθαι νυκτὸς ταῖς τῶν Ἀθηναίων γυναιξὶν Θεσμοφόρια ἀγούσαις ἐν Ἐλευσῖνι (‘that the Megarians, coming in ships, would attempt to attack at night the Athenian women celebrating the Thesmophoria at Eleusis’).47 It is difficult to determine if there is any significance in his designation of the women as Athenian, rather than Eleusinian. This source tells us that the Thesmophoria festival at Eleusis, presumably from an early date, included nocturnal rituals. Although this is one of the earliest surviving sources on the Thesmophoria festival, the tone and lack of detail given suggests that Aeneas Tacticus expects his audience to be familiar already with the festival, and especially with its association with women. Additionally, there is archaeological evidence for the Thesmophoria festival at Eleusis in the form of megara, the pits into which the piglet remains were supposedly placed, although there is no consensus over which pits specifically at the sanctuary at Eleusis might have been used for the Thesmophoria festival.48 If the Thesmophoria festival at Eleusis indeed shared its facilities with the Eleusinian Mysteries, it is easy to theorise that this would affect the cultic landscape, both physically and conceptually.

The Sicilian Thesmophoria After Athens, Sicily is one of the locations with the largest amount of surviving evidence for the worship of Demeter and Kore-Persephone.49 Sicily would be a prime location for a strong celebration of Demeter and 45 48 49

46 47 For example, Cronkite 1997: 387. Aen. Tact. 4.8–12. Aen. Tact. 4.8–12. See Clinton 1988: 73–76; Robertson 1996: 329–30; McLardy 2015. E.g. Pind. Ol. 6.92–96; Pl. Ep. 7.349c–d; Nep. Dion 8.5; Cic. Verr. 2.4.53, 4.48.107; Diod. Sic. 4.23.4, 5.2–6, 11.26.7, 14.63.1, 14.70.4–6, 14.72.1, 16.66.4–5, 19.5.4; Hyg. Fab. 146; Ov. Met. 5.341–571; Ov. Fast. 4.393–620; Plut. Dion 56.5–6; Ath. 3.108f–109a, 10.416b, 14.629e, 14.647a; see Polacco 1986 for further sources and analysis.

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Kore-Persephone, given the popularity of the two goddesses there and the prominence of Sicilian locations in Demetrian myth.50 The primary sources provide multiple references to the worship of Demeter and KorePersephone. Temples or shrines to the goddesses are mentioned frequently; two of these, located in Enna and Katana, are specifically noted to be restricted to woman.51 This is interesting to note in the context that examples of the Thesmophoria festival throughout the Greek world are generally associated with a restriction to female participants.52 There are also mentions of feasts or festivals to the goddesses either singularly or as a divine pair.53 Some ancient sources specifically locate the myth of the rape of Persephone in Sicily – for example, Hyginus states that it took place at Mount Etna, and Diodorus Siculus locates the action of the myth at the Kyane Spring and claims this was the origin for the institution of an annual sacrifice and festival.54 Sacrifices and festivals to the two goddesses are also highlighted by Diodorus Siculus, who explains: οἱ δὲ κατὰ τὴν Σικελίαν, διὰ τὴν τῆς Δήμητρος καὶ Κόρης πρὸς αὐτοὺς οἰκειότηα πρῶτοι τῆς εὑρέσεως τοῦ σίτου μεταλαβόντες, ἑκατέρᾳ τῶν θεῶν κατέδειξαν θυσίας καὶ πανηγύρεις, ἐπωνύμους αὐταῖς ποιήσαντες. The inhabitants of Sicily, because of the intimate relationship of Demeter and Kore with them, having partaken first of the discovery of grain, introduced sacrifices and festivals to each of the goddesses, and they were named after them.55

Diodorus Siculus is here probably referring to the Koreia festival in honour of Kore-Persephone. The corresponding festival in honour of Demeter is likely to be the Thesmophoria festival, because the Thesmophoria is the most widespread festival of Demeter, and is named after her in the form of her epithet Thesmophoros. 50

51

52 53

54

55

Diod. Sic. 5.4.5 discusses the relationship of the Sicilians to Demeter and Kore-Persephone. For the geographical setting of Demetrian myth, see Richardson 1974: 74–86, 148–50. Dio. Sic. 5.3.2–3, 5.4.2; Cic. Verr. 2.4.106–07; Ov. Met. 5.385; Ov. Fast. 4.422; Hyg. Fab. 146; Opp. H. 3.485 all set the rape of Persephone in Sicily. Diod. Sic. 9.26.7, 14.63.1, 14.70.4–6, 19.5.4; Nep. Dion 8.5. Cic. Verr. 2.4.99, 2.5.187; Lactant. Div. Inst. 2.4. For example, Parker 2011: 199 describes it as ‘the “women only” festival par excellence’. Pind. Ol. 6.92–96, Plut. Dion 56.5–6, Hsch s.v. Κόρεια; Poll. Onom. 1.37, cf. Strabo 6.51 for Southern Italy. Diod Sic 4.23.4. Other sources argue for Enna (Diod. Sic. 5.3.2–3, Cic. Verr. 2.4.106–07, Ov. Met. 5.385, Ov. Fast. 4.422), Syracuse (Diod. Sic. 5.4.2), and Mount Aetna (Hyg. Fab. 146, Opp. H. 3.485). Diod. Sic. 5.4.5.

Local Variation in the Thesmophoria Festival

Turning to evidence for the Thesmophoria festival from Sicily, there are a few important literary sources. A few mention the Thesmophoria festival by name, and others describe a festival in enough detail that it is probable that it is the Thesmophoria which they are discussing. Polyainos mentions a Thesmophoria festival in Akragas which he situates, albeit from a distant viewpoint in the second century CE, at the time of Phalaris (ca. 570s BCE).56 No detail of the actual festival is provided other than that the ‘citizens’ were celebrating this festival. There is no particular suggestion that the festival was restricted to women, as Polyainos describes the participants as citizens and then notes the fate of men, women and children. This sort of reference is clearly not intended to provide information on the festival other than as an aside, and this is seen elsewhere in regard to the Thesmophoria festival, where the festival is mentioned as an aside to show that the people (or specifically women) were occupied with something else, giving someone a chance to make an attack unexpectedly.57 The other author who mentions the Thesmophoria festival in Sicily specifically is Athenaios, citing as his authority Herakleides the Syracusan.58 He does not provide much detail on the festival, perhaps assuming some knowledge on the part of his audience. He describes special cakes called mulloi, made in honour of Demeter and Kore-Persephone, as follows: ΜΥΛΛΟΙ. Ἡρακλείδης ὁ Συρακόσιος ἐν τῷ περὶ Θεσμῶν ἐν Συρακούσαις φησὶ τοῖς Παντελείοις τῶν Θεσμοφορίων ἐκ σησάμου καὶ μέλιτος κατασκευάζεσθαι ἐφήβαια γυναικεῖα, ἃ καλεῖσθαι κατὰ πᾶσαν Σικελίαν μυλλοὺς καὶ περιφέρεσθαι ταῖς θεαῖς. Mulloi: Herakleides the Syracusan in On the Customs amongst the Syracusans says at the Panteleia of the Thesmophoria, female genitalia were made from sesame-seeds and honey, which are called mulloi all throughout Sicily, and carried around for the goddesses.59

From Athenaios, it is clear that part of the Thesmophoria festival in Syracuse was called the Panteleia. During this part of the festival, the people created cakes called mulloi, made in the shape of female genitalia out of sesame-seeds and honey. These cakes were carried around in honour of the goddesses. Although he seems to be discussing the Syracusan 56 57

58

Polyaenus, Strat. 5.1. For the story of Battus, see Ael. F 44 (Hercher 1866); Suda s.v. Θεσμοφόρος (Adler Θ272); Suda s.v. Σφάκτριαι (Adler Σ1714). For the story of Aristomenes, see Paus. 4.17.1. See also Detienne 1989 for a discussion of the sources. 59 Ath. 14.647a. Ath. 14.647a.

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Thesmophoria, he does note that cakes of this shape and composition are known as mulloi throughout Sicily, hinting at a more widespread practice. To these two sources may be added Diodorus Siculus’ discussion of a festival in honour of Demeter and Kore in Syracuse.60 Diodorus Siculus does not name the festival to which he refers, but there has been general agreement amongst modern scholars that this is a description of the Thesmophoria.61 The features, such as Diodorus Siculus identifies them, match the general outline of the Thesmophoria festival as it is known from other locations, and the Thesmophoria is by far the most widely celebrated of the Demetrian festivals. Diodorus Siculus’ festival took place at the time of the sowing of the grain, and involved some sort of archaising rituals, imitating an ancient way of life. The celebration took ten days, and was named for the goddess Demeter. It is clear that Diodorus Siculus is aware of Demeter’s epithet, Thesmophoros, as he discusses its meaning in the next section of his text.62 The participants indulged in some ritual custom which involved communicating with one another using vulgar or obscene language. This last point is linked by Diodorus Siculus directly to the myth of Persephone. Diodorus is not specific about where in Sicily his festival takes place; in other places in his text he specifies what city he is discussing, but in the section on festivals to Demeter and Kore, he refers only to the Sicilians as a general group, giving the impression that this was a festival that was celebrated throughout Sicily. Although there are a number of other festivals of Demeter and Kore-Persephone known from Sicily, none of them match the description that Diodorus gives in this passage.63 There is further evidence that local Thesmophoria festivals were taking place at a number of locations outside of Syracuse and Akragas, including at Enna, Morgantina, Heloros, and Katana.64 However, none of these locations yield enough specific evidence to reconstruct the ritual activities and assess whether these exhibited a local flair. Archaeological evidence is

60 61

62 63

64

Diod. Sic. 5.4. Scholars who identify this festival as the Thesmophoria include Brelich 1964: 49; White 1964: 265; Robertson 1999: 14, n. 47; Goff 2004: 126, n. 137; Kowalzig 2008: 138; Johnston 2013: 375, n. 14. Others argue that it cannot be proven to be a Thesmophoria festival, but still note the strong similarities to the Thesmophoria, such as Hinz 1998: 29. Diod. Sic. 5.5.2–3. Other festivals named by ancient sources include the Anthesphoria (Poll. Onom. 1.37; Strabo 6.1.5), the Anakalypteria (schol. Pind. Ol. 6.161g), the Theogamia (Poll. Onom. 1.37) and the Koreia (Plut. Dion 56.6, Hsch s.v. Kóreia; Diod. Sic. 5.4.6). For Henna, see Cic. Verr. 2.5.187; Lactant. Div. Inst. 2.4; Strabo 6.2.6. For Morgantina, see Bell 1981: 97–103; MacLachlan 2012: 352. For Heloros, see Cronkite 1997: 388. For Katana, see Cic. Verr. 2.4.99, 2.5.187; Lactant. Div. Inst. 2.4.

Local Variation in the Thesmophoria Festival

available from the thesmophorion at Bitalemi in Gela and the Demetrian sanctuary at Akragas.65 A few other sanctuaries have been tentatively identified as thesmophoria.66 The sanctuary at Bitalemi has been concretely identified as a thesmophorion on the basis of inscriptional evidence.67 The presence of a sanctuary officially designated as a thesmophorion implies the worship of Demeter Thesmophoros, and it would be expected that this would be associated with the main festival of this incarnation of Demeter.68 There is also one literary reference to the thesmophorion at Syracuse in Plutarch, which suggests that one went down into the sanctuary in Syracuse.69 As one of few securely identified thesmophorion sanctuaries, it provides interesting material evidence regarding the artefact compositions that might be expected in such a sanctuary. There are, of course, many Demetrian sanctuaries, and the general artefact assemblages associated with these are well-known. However, it would be interesting if thesmophorion sanctuaries could be shown to have specific artefact assemblages to help identify them in the absence of epigraphical evidence. At Bitalemi, excavators found evidence for communal feasting and large amounts of terracotta figurines, with a predominance of women carrying hydriai (hydrophoroi) or piglets, as well as many miniature votive hydriai.70 There were also deposits of votive offerings which were found in situ, including small vessels set out in specific patterns, as well as terracotta figurines of women carrying piglets and poppy flowers, and pig bones.71 At Akragas, similar deposits of votive offerings were found.72 It is worth noting that Akragas was a colony of Gela, so it is plausible that these votive offerings and whatever rituals were associated with them might have been a practice unique to the Gelan Thesmophoria festival, which they exported to their colony at Akragas.73 It has been suggested that these unusual votive

65

66 67 68

69 71 72

73

For Akragas, see Cronkite 1997: 296–98; see also Polyaenus, Strat. 5.1. For Gela/Bitalemi, see Kron 1992; Cronkite 1997: 328–29. See Spatafora 2016 for Entella. Larson 2007: 82 identifies two other potential sites. IGASMG II2 46a; Orlandini 1966: 20; see also Kron 1992: 614–15. For example, see the comments of Parker 2017: 13 on the link between the epithet, festival and sanctuary; also Parker 2007: 271. 70 Plut. Dion 56.3–4. Burkert 1985: 243; Kron 1992: 624, 643–48; Cronkite 1997: 328–29. Kron 1992: 643–48; Nixon 1995: 78–82; Cronkite 1997: 329. Holloway 1991: 61; Larson 2007: 82. Similar displays are also alluded to at Heloros: see van Buren 1966: 358; Larson 2007: 82. And on the Italian mainland: see Sfameni Gasparro 2009: 142–43 and Rafanelli 2014: 576 (not specifically Demetrian, but a chthonic context). Cronkite 1997: 296–98. Alternatively, this could be part of a wider variation in the context of Magna Graecia, as demonstrated by the similar evidence in the previous footnote.

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offerings might be associated with local chthonic rituals, perhaps linked to the increased prominence of Persephone’s chthonic attributes in the Sicilian context.74

Similarities and Differences between the Attic and Sicilian Thesmophoria Festivals By focusing on the evidence for these two specific Thesmophoria festivals without recourse to a generalised ‘universal’ reconstruction of the festival, there are not many details which we can securely identify as common between the festivals. This highlights the issues with relying on a universal reconstruction of the festival to fill in the gaps in the evidence. It is also important to acknowledge that there were probably more commonalities than this analysis shows, due to the vagaries of the survival of ancient evidence. As Parker argues, the ‘randomness of the evidence that is available to us for Attic festivals’ confounds attempts to create a complete picture, and this can be expanded to refer to Greek festivals in general.75 The general pattern of ritual sites is similar, with there being a number of locations in both areas that boast a thesmophorion and which therefore very likely were the locus for a celebration of the Thesmophoria festival. There is also evidence that both had a range of festivals, sacrifices, and other rituals which honoured Demeter and Kore-Persephone as a divine pair. It is likely that the fact that the women go up to the thesmophorion in Athens, but go down to the thesmophorion in Syracuse is a function of individual differences in the locations and layouts of sanctuaries to fit a local environment.76 This is not necessarily a significant ritually driven difference. It is possible to speculate that an underground thesmophorion would provide useful opportunities in terms of preserving the secrecy of nocturnal rites from the male gaze, especially in locations where the geography may not provide convenient high ground for this purpose. This could represent an example of the women using important local geographical features to intertwine the rituals for Demeter Thesmophoros with the surrounding physical landscape.

74 76

75 E.g. Greenewalt 1978: 55; Holloway 1991: 55; Larson 2007: 82. Parker 2007: 156. Parker 2007: 272, based on evidence from Aristophanes, argues for an Athenian understanding that one goes up to a Thesmophoria festival, developed from both the name of the first day, anodos, and the positioning of sanctuaries often in high places.

Local Variation in the Thesmophoria Festival

In both Attica and Sicily, the festival is explicitly linked with the time of the sowing of the grain. This was not necessarily the same month, suggesting that it was more important to link the festival to the local agricultural cycle than to hold it at the same time at disparate locations in the Greek world. There is also support for the idea that the women remained at the sanctuary for some or all of the festival in both locations – literary evidence from Athens, and potential archaeological evidence from two sites in Sicily.77 Two important features stand out as unexpected for this analysis – the association of fasting and mourning, especially with the second day of the festival, which is mentioned only in the Athenian evidence, and the ritual practice of aischrologia, which is mentioned only in the Sicilian evidence. These are both key features of modern Panhellenic reconstructions of the festival. The association of fasting and mourning is supported for a number of locations outside Athens, and it is likely that it was a feature of the Sicilian Thesmophoria festival as well, even though there is no surviving evidence to support this.78 Likewise, the ritual practice of aischrologia is recorded in other Athenian contexts, often specifically associated in these sources with Demetrian ritual, so it is plausible that this was a feature of the Athenian Thesmophoria despite the lack of specific extant evidence.79 A number of other elements of the festival cannot be paralleled between the Attic and Sicilian examples, but as many of these do not contain much detail or are mentioned only in a small number of sources, it is difficult to judge the significance of these. These include the prohibitions on wearing flower crowns and eating pomegranate seeds, the requirement of chastity, the unspecified nocturnal rituals, dancing, and the ritual with the piglets and the megara on the Attic side, and the unspecified archaising rituals and the ritual assemblages of artefacts found at sanctuaries on the Sicilian side. The mulloi cakes, which are not recorded in any sources outside of a Sicilian context, and the freeing of prisoners and cessation of business, which are specifically associated with an Athenian context and mentioned only in a single source each, will be explored further in reference to local influences in the next section.

77

78

79

Ar. Thesm. 622–24, 658. Potential indications of overnight habitation suggested from excavations at Bitalemi (Gela) (see Kron 1992: 620–22) and Akragas (see Cronkite 1997: 296–98). Ar. Av. 1519; Ar. Thesm. 947–49, 984; Ath. 307f; Callim. Hymn 6.1–9; Plut. Dem. 30; Plut. De Is. et Os. 69; Suda s.v. Θεσμοφόρια (Adler Θ270). Brumfield 1996; Halliwell 2008: 160–91.

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There are also elements of the two festivals that show a clear divergence in ritual practice. One of these is the length of the festival, which was three days in Athens, but can tentatively be argued to be ten days in Sicily. The day names given in the sources also differ; however it is difficult to judge the significance of this as only one day name survives in the primary source material for the Sicilian Thesmophoria festival. Accepting that the festival is ten days in length, this does not preclude the Sicilian festival also having three days with the same names as Athens for which evidence has not survived. Another important divergence is the firm focus in Athenian evidence on a restriction to female participants, even if the details of which women could attend are difficult to discern. Meanwhile, the Sicilian evidence does not focus on this aspect at all, and some of the source material leaves open the possibility that both men and women could attend for at least parts of the festival.

The Local and the Universal in the Attic and Sicilian Thesmophoria Festivals Thinking specifically of the Attic examples discussed above, I argue that this is not, as it is often treated in the modern academic literature, our fullest example of a traditional Thesmophoria festival. Instead, it is a festival which incorporates its own variations – variations which modern scholars have sometimes extrapolated to other city-states and imposed upon the Thesmophoria festival more widely than the evidence necessarily supports. It is interesting that in the central Athenian evidence for the Thesmophoria festival, the elements which are not found in evidence from any other location have a specifically Athenian flavour. This suggests an incorporation of rituals into the Thesmophoria festival that are linked to a specifically Athenian context, perhaps even to give the Thesmophoria festival that veneer of being one of the ancient Athenian festivals. It is clear from the evidence that in Athens, men paid for their wives to attend the Thesmophoria festival.80 Perhaps the Athenian Thesmophoria festival, influenced by the strongly political democratic atmosphere that pervades ancient Athens, took on more quasi-civic elements than it may have had in other locations and time periods.81 80 81

Isae. 3.80; Men. Epit. 749–50. See also Goff 2004 for a discussion of how women’s ritual may interact with the political context in Athens.

Local Variation in the Thesmophoria Festival

One example of this in action is the cessation of business on the middle day of the festival. The only other evidence for a cessation of legal business on certain days of the Thesmophoria festival is a single inscription from Thasos, banning legal proceedings on one day of the Thasian Thesmophoria festival.82 Instead of being a universal feature of the Thesmophoria festival then, I argue that this cessation of legal business was a particularly Athenian element of the festival. Thasos was heavily influenced by the Athenians at various points throughout the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, so perhaps the Athenians passed this variant practice onto the Thasians.83 The cessation of business on the middle day of the Thesmophoria festival, for example, could have had a practical function which became ritualised. There is debate about the exact location of the central thesmophorion in Athens which probably would have belonged to the deme of Melite.84 Suggestions range from the Pnyx to a vague location on the slopes of the Acropolis, somewhere in the vicinity of the Sanctuary of Demeter and Kore.85 Alternatively, perhaps it was not a practical consideration, but instead an act of religious piety not to conduct male civic business whilst the important female ritual business of ensuring the ongoing fertility of the city, its surroundings, and its inhabitants was taking place.86 A similar argument may be made regarding the freeing of prisoners on the second day of the Thesmophoria festival, which again is recorded in only one source.87 There has been much debate in the academic literature about whether a single explanation must be found for the freeing of prisoners and the suspension of legal business, and what the underlying explanation(s) may be.88 However, I focus instead on the fact that the practice of freeing prisoners was also associated with two other Athenian festivals, the Panatheneia and the Dionysia.89 It is worth noting that both the Dionysia and Panatheneia are distinctively Athenian festivals. If the evidence is sound and it was indeed just these three festivals in Athens which incorporated a practice of freeing prisoners as part of their rituals, it 82 84 85

86

87 88 89

83 The inscription can be found in Salviat 1958: 250. Robinson 2011: 180–81. Clinton 1996: 120. For the debate, see Thompson 1936: 185; Broneer 1942: 262, 274; Clinton 1996: 123–24; Dillon 2002: 119. E.g. Xen. Hell. 5.2.29 notes that the Theban men kept away from the area when the women celebrated the Thesmophoria festival, and instead conducted business elsewhere, although this could have a practical basis. Walz, Rhet. Graec. IV 462. Deubner 1956: 58; Parke 1977: 86; Versnel 1993: 238–39; Goff 2004: 210. Schol. Dem. 22.170b (Dilts 1983).

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is surely possible that a practice of freeing prisoners may have been an element of the Athenian Thesmophoria festival exclusively, not a widespread feature of the Thesmophoria festival. The Sicilian celebrations of the Thesmophoria festival also raise questions about the link between the local and the universal in a Thesmophorian context. As discussed above, Sicily is notable for its very strong relationship with the goddesses Demeter and Kore-Persephone. There is evidence that there was an extensive festival cycle that celebrated all the major events in the myth of the rape of Persephone, of which the Thesmophoria festival must have been a major part.90 Various scholars suggest that the rituals and mythology related to Demeter and more particularly to Persephone may have been influenced to one or more chthonic indigenous Sicel goddesses who were worshipped in the region prior to Greek influence.91 This would explain why Demeter and KorePersephone were so strongly venerated in Sicily and also why there seem to be hints that their relationship was different from elsewhere in the Greek world, with Persephone taking on a much more dominant role than normal.92 With the profile of Persephone as queen of the underworld promoted for its chthonic associations, there may be less focus on Persephone as Kore, the maiden, and on the mother–daughter relationship between Demeter and Kore-Persephone. It is possible that the presence of these other influences may lay behind the hypothesised longer time for celebrating the festival in the Syracusan, and probably generally in the Sicilian, examples of the Thesmophoria. With the increased profile of Demeter and Persephone in Sicily, it would be expected that both male and female members of the community would be interested in participating in the rituals honouring the two goddesses. Of course, given the well-known secrecy that surrounds certain rituals of the Thesmophoria festival, it is to be expected that these more widespread ritual activities of the Thesmophoria festival probably remained restricted to female participants only. Certainly, this would include the piglet sacrifice, and probably the practice of aischrologia and perhaps a ritual search for the missing Persephone. However, other elements could have addressed the needs of the local community and included both male and female participants. When considering the Syracusan celebration of the Thesmophoria festival, three main innovations that might be motivated by local factors are 90 91

Hinz 1998: 29; Kowalzig 2008: 138, n. 27. E.g. Shepherd 2005: 116; 2015: 575–76; MacLachlan 2016.

92

MacLachlan 2016: 190.

Local Variation in the Thesmophoria Festival

indicated in the evidence: the shape of the sacrificial cakes, the length of the festival, and the people who were allowed to participate in the festival. The mulloi cakes are not mentioned in texts from any other location. In comparable evidence, a scholion to Lucian does describe cakes in the shape of male genitalia in a Thesmophorian context, and this is often adopted as a widespread feature of the Thesmophoria festival in modern reconstructions.93 The women at Aristophanes’ Thesmophoria festival also offer sesame cakes, but Aristophanes does not give any clues as to what shape he imagined (or perhaps knew) these cakes to be.94 Aristophanes’ cakes are offered to the goddesses, the scholiast to Lucian’s are placed in the megara with the piglet remains and left to rot.95 Athenaios, citing a local authority in Herakleides of Syracuse, says that the mulloi cakes were carried around to honour Demeter and Kore-Persephone.96 Therefore, the presence of cakes in the shape of female genitalia does not preclude the Syracusan festival also containing cakes in the shapes of male genitalia, perhaps as part of a different ritual within the festival. The mulloi cakes and the processions are both specifically linked with the panteleia.97 Given this term does not occur elsewhere, it seems likely that these cakes and the rituals associated with them are a unique practice in the Syracusan (or perhaps more widely Sicilian) celebrations of the Thesmophoria festival. Some scholars have linked these cakes to the strong traditions relating to the goddess Persephone in a Sicilian context. For example, MacLachlan suggests that these cakes are specifically intended to represent Persephone’s genitalia and that they are a manifestation of the special focus on Persephone, elevating her in importance compared to her mother Demeter.98 A similar suggestion is made to explain the presence of unusual votive deposits at Bitalemi (Gela) and at Akragas, where excavators suggested a use in some kind of chthonic ritual; again, there is a suggestion that Persephone’s position has been strengthened and extended by potential syncretism with some unrecorded chthonic Sicel goddess.99 It has been tentatively accepted by many scholars that the Syracusan Thesmophoria festival was ten days in duration. To this can be added the testimony of Plato, who refers, in a letter written during a visit to Syracuse, to a ten-day women’s ritual that interrupts his plans.100 Scholars have linked this to the evidence of Diodorus Siculus, discussed earlier, which

93 95 97 100

94 Schol. Luc. Dial. meret. 2.1 (Rabe 1906). Ar. Thesm. 280–305, 570. 96 Ar. Thesm. 280–305, 570; schol. Luc. Dial. meret. 2.1 (Rabe 1906). Ath. 14.647a. 98 99 Ath. 14.647a. MacLachlan 2016: 190. E.g. Holloway 1991: 55; Larson 2007: 82. Pl. Ep. 349d.

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noted that in Sicily, due to the close relationship between the Sicilian people and Demeter, her greatest festival was a ten-day affair.101 Neither text specifically mentions the Thesmophoria festival; however, there are good reasons to accept that Diodorus Siculus refers to a ten-day Thesmophoria festival. To reiterate, in the context of his discussion and the features he describes, the Thesmophoria festival is the obvious candidate, fitting both the general description, and being the most prominent festival in honour of Demeter celebrated in the Greek world.102 It is less clear that Plato definitively refers to the same festival; he does not specify the name of the deity that the women are celebrating, and it is, perhaps, unexpected that they should be holding this ritual in the garden where he was lodging upon the Acropolis. There was, however, a sanctuary to Demeter on the Acropolis, as well as one in Ortygia.103 Athenaios, as seen in the above quote, mentions what seems to be a day name of panteleia when discussing the Syracusan Thesmophoria festival. It is possible that different local Thesmophoria festivals had different names for the days, although the modern scholarly reconstruction uses the Athenian day names (anodos, nēsteia, kalligeneia). However, it is reasonable to suppose that the day names may have been more widely associated with the Thesmophoria festival than just within an Athenian context, as other than this mention of panteleia and a mention of a day called prostropē in the Thasian Thesmophoria festival, there is no other clear evidence for alternate day names.104 This suggests that perhaps panteleia was the name of one of the extra days of the festival – obviously a ten-day festival requires many more day names, and activities, than a three-day festival. Even in a three-day festival like the Attic Thesmophoria, much information about the activities that took place throughout this time period has not survived, and this is even more the case in a longer festival.105 There has been some debate about whether the Sicilian Thesmophoria festival was open to men and women, but there is not sufficient evidence to explore this. Most of the evidence for rituals restricted to women or potentially including men does not mention the Thesmophoria by name.106 There are examples of Demetrian festivals from elsewhere in the Greek world, such as the festival of Demeter Musia at Pellene

101 102 103 106

Diod. Sic. 5.4. See Robertson 1999: 14 who notes that this is generally accepted by scholars. 104 105 Cronkite 1997: 519–21. See Salviat 1958: 250 for prostropē. Parker 2007: 274. Cic. Verr. 4.107 suggests men could attend an unspecified anniversary festival linked to the abduction of Persephone, whilst Pl. Ep. 349d suggests some rituals were for women only.

Local Variation in the Thesmophoria Festival

(in Achaea), which had a mixture of ritual activities, some open to all members of the community, and others restricted to only female participants.107 It is possible that with a longer festival length in Sicily, a similar arrangement exists here – the main rituals of the Thesmophoria festival which were preserved with such secrecy throughout the Greek world presumably remained restricted to female participants, but perhaps men were allowed to participate in some of the rituals that must have filled the extra seven days. These extra rituals, whatever they may have been, could plausibly have specifically addressed ritual needs of the local Syracusan community.

Conclusion Although the evidence is fractured by time, both the Attic and Sicilian examples of the Thesmophoria festival show evidence of variation. My intention is not to argue that there is not a complex of ritual activities that the ancient Greeks recognised as embodying a Thesmophoria festival; some practices that were recognised as key elements of the festival must have underlain the Thesmophoria festival in (almost) all its many incarnations.108 Instead, I argue that some features of the festival were widespread, perhaps almost universally part of the Thesmophoria festival, but that others were prone to change, and specifically, change for the reason of adapting to the needs of the local community. These relationships between local and universal must be viewed as dynamic and variable over time and space; this would be necessary in order for them to maintain their relevance, as the needs of the local community would also be rooted in their specific chronological and geographical circumstances. Inherent within the idea of local adaptations of the Thesmophoria festival is a focus on the local physical and sacred geographical landscape and the role that this plays in both the practical and conceptual aspects of local religious ritual. Such variations would have made festivals such as the Thesmophoria more relevant to their local communities and thus served to make a greater impact on the lived experience of their female participants. This is, 107

108

Paus. 7.27.9–10. Sfameni Gasparro 2009: 155 argues that the festival at Pellene might be a variation on the Thesmophoria festival. Parker 2007: 167 notes that men had roles in other Demetrian women’s festivals in an Attic context. It may be that not all festivals had the same collection of core rituals, but, following Wittgenstein’s 1953 theory of family resemblance, that there were instead overlapping similarities that allowed for their identification as a Thesmophoria festival, even if there were not a single feature which was common to all celebrations of the Thesmophoria festival.

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perhaps, especially important in a festival that is typically restricted to women. As women had less of a role in the socio-political world and in many cases a much narrower range of life experiences outside their immediate community, it is easy to imagine that their focus would have been more strongly on the local context than their male counterparts: local community, local friends, local concerns. One way in which this local influence may have been felt is, as discussed above, by alterations to the rituals themselves. It is interesting to note that the parts of the festival that are most closely linked to the underlying myth of Demeter and Kore-Persephone are the parts that seem to be most widely spread. This suggests that perhaps most widespread features of the festival were closely tied to re-enactment of the mythological precedent. This would include such elements as fasting and mourning, nocturnal rituals where perhaps the women searched for the lost Persephone, and the piglet sacrifice with its clear connections to the myth. At any rate, piglet sacrifice was commonly associated with Demetrian ritual in general.109 Perhaps other elements might have been more amenable to being varied in order to suit the local community, and then, of course, might eventually themselves have become traditional aspects of the festival in that specific location. This could include elements such as the date of the festival, which varied from place to place.110 The evidence suggests that the important factor was that the Thesmophoria festival took place at the correct time in the agricultural cycle, rather than it taking place at the same time everywhere in the Greek world.111 Other elements might have been attracted into the festival from pre-existing local religious traditions, or from incidents that happened during a celebration of the festival earlier on and were then commemorated in future celebrations in that place.112 Both of these aspects have been suggested to explain specific variations in relation to the Thesmophoria festival in specific locations, by both modern and ancient commentators. In recent years there has been growing awareness of the presence of variation and the importance of the local dimension in discussions about

109 110

111 112

E.g. Jarman 1973; White 1984: 20–21; Ruscillo 2013: 185. E.g. the Thasian, Delian, and perhaps Theban Thesmophoria festivals appear to be in Metageitnion (August/September); see IG XI2 287a.67; Xen. Hell. 5.2.29; Salviat 1958: 212, 248. But the Athenian Thesmophoria festival is in Pyanopsion (October/November); see schol. Ar. Thesm. 80 (Dübner 1877). E.g. Dillon 2002, 111. For pre-existing local religious traditions, see discussions on Sicily in this paper. For commemoration of historical incidents, see for example Hsch. s.v. diōgma (Latte Δ2036).

Local Variation in the Thesmophoria Festival

the Thesmophoria festival and Greek religion in general. It is important to focus further attention on this variation in the case of the Thesmophoria festival, which has long been represented as a primarily static Panhellenic festival in modern discussions over the last century or more. The prior research has given scholars a firm base for their investigations into the festival, and a large range of evidence from different times and places has been gathered by past scholars. Now we are in a good position to shift our focus and investigate further the importance of the local dimension in this, the most popular of ancient Greek women’s festivals. A focus on the local context and on the form of the Thesmophoria festival at specific times and places has the potential to reveal more about why the festival remained popular for so many centuries. It also speaks to how the festival gained, and maintained, relevance to different communities of women living in different circumstances across a wide range of geographical and chronological spaces. The evidence supports the interpretation that the relationship between local tradition, local ritual, and local community is integral to the Thesmophoria festival and its enduring existence throughout many centuries. Although the Thesmophoria festival itself may be universal, the interpretation of this theme is thoroughly local, with local meanings directed towards a local audience.

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 . .  Buren, A. W. van (1966) ‘News Letter from Rome’, American Journal of Archaeology 70(4), 349–61. Burkert, W. (1985) Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical, transl. J. Raffan. London. Clinton, K. (1988) ‘Sacrifice in the Eleusinian Mysteries’, in R. Hägg, N. Marinatos and G. C. Nordquist (eds.) Early Greek Cult Practice, Proceedings of the Fifth International Symposium at the Swedish Institute at Athens, 26–29 June, 1986. Stockholm, 69–80. (1992) Myth and Cult: The Iconography of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Stockholm. (1996) ‘The Thesmophorion in Central Athens and the Celebration of the Thesmophoria in Attica’, in R. Hägg (ed.) The Role of Religion in the Early Greek Polis: Proceedings of the Third International Seminar on Ancient Greek Cult, Organized by the Swedish Institute of Athens, 16–18 October 1992. Stockholm, 111–25. Cronkite, S.-M. (1997) ‘The Sanctuary of Demeter at Mytilene: A Diachronic and Contextual Study’. PhD thesis, University of London. Detienne, M. (1989) ‘The Violence of Wellborn Ladies: Women in the Thesmophoria’, in M. Detienne and J.-P. Vernant (eds.) The Cuisine of Sacrifice among the Greeks. Chicago, Ill., 129–47. Deubner, L. (1956) Attische Feste. Berlin. Dillon, M. P. J. (2002) Girls and Women in Classical Greek Religion. London. (2015) ‘Households, Families, and Women’, in E. Eidinow and J. Kindt (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Greek Religion. Oxford, 241–55. Dilts, M. R. (1983) Scholia Demosthenica Volume 1. Leipzig. Dübner, F. (1877) Scholia Graeca in Aristophanem. Paris. Goff, B. (2004) Citizens Bacchae: Women’s Ritual Practice in Ancient Greece. Berkeley, Calif. Greenewalt, C. H. (1978) Ritual Dinners in Early Historic Sardis. Berkeley, Calif. Halliwell, S. (2008). Greek Laughter: A Study of Cultural Psychology from Homer to Early Christianity. Cambridge. Hercher, R. (1866). Claudii Aeliani de Natura Animalium Libri XVII, Varia Historia, Epistolae, Fragmenta Volume 2. Leipzig. Hinz, V. (1998) Der Kult von Demeter und Kore auf Sizilien und in der Magna Graecia. Wiesbaden. Holloway, R. R. (1991) The Archaeology of Ancient Sicily. London. Jarman, M. R. (1973) ‘Preliminary Report on the Animal Bones’, in J. N. Coldstream (ed.) Knossos: The Sanctuary of Demeter. London, 177–79. Johnston, S. I. (2013) ‘Demeter, Myths, and the Polyvalence of Festivals’, History of Religions 52(4), 370–401. Kowalzig, B. (2008) ‘Nothing to do with Demeter? Something to do with Sicily! Theatre and Society in the Early Fifth-Century West’, in M. Revermann and P. Wilson (eds.) Performance, Iconography, Reception: Studies in Honour of Oliver Taplin. Oxford, 128–60.

Local Variation in the Thesmophoria Festival Kron, U. (1992) ‘Frauenfeste in Demeterheiligtümern: das Thesmophorion von Bitalemi. Eine archäologische Fallstudie’, Archäologischer Anzeiger, 611–50. Larson, J. L. (2007) Ancient Greek Cults: A Guide. New York, N.Y. Latte, K. (ed.) (1953–66) Hesychii Alexandrini Lexicon, 2 volumes. Copenhagen. Lowe, N. J. (1998) ‘Thesmophoria and Haloa: Myth, Physics and Mysteries’, in S. Blundell and M. Williamson (eds.) The Sacred and the Feminine in Ancient Greece. London, 149–73. MacLachlan, B. (2012) ‘The Grave’s a Fine and Funny Place: Chthonic Rituals and Comic Theatre in the Greek West’, in K. Bosher (ed.) Theatre outside Athens: Drama in Greek Sicily and South Italy. Cambridge, 343–66. (2016) ‘Inhabiting/Subverting the Norms: Women’s Ritual Agency in the Greek West’, in M. Dillon, E. Eidinow and L. Maurizio (eds.) Women’s Ritual Competence in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean. New York, N.Y., 182–96. McLardy, K. R. L. (2015) ‘The Megara of the Thesmophoria: Reconciling the Textual and Archaeological Records’, Chronika 5, 1–8. Meineke, A. (1849) Stephani Byzantii Ethnicorum Quae Supersunt. Berlin. Nilsson, M. P. (1906) Griechische Feste von Religiöser Bedeutung mit Ausschluss der Attischen. Leipzig. Nixon, L. (1995) ‘The Cults of Demeter and Kore’, in R. Hawley and B. Levick (eds.) Women in Antiquity: New Assessments. London, 75–96. Orlandini, P. (1966) ‘Lo scavo del Thesmophorion di Bitalemi e il culto delle divinita ctonie a Gela’, Kokalos 12, 8–35. Parke, H. W. (1977) Festivals of the Athenians. London. Parker, R. (2007) Polytheism and Society at Athens. Oxford. (2011) On Greek Religion. Ithaca, N.Y. and London. (2017) Greek Gods Abroad: Names, Natures, and Transformations. Oakland, Calif. Pirenne-Delforge, V. (2008) Retour à la source: Pausanias et la religion grecque. Liège. Polacco, L. (1986) ‘I culti di Demetra e Kore a Siracusa’, Numismatica e Antichita Classiche 15, 21–37. Rabe, H. (1906) Scholia in Lucianum. Leipzig. Rafanelli, S. (2014) ‘Archaeological Evidence for Etruscan Religious Rituals’, in J. M. Turfa (ed.) The Etruscan World. London, 566–93. Richardson, N. J. (1974) The Homeric Hymn to Demeter. Oxford. Robertson, N. (1996) ‘New Light on Demeter’s Mysteries: The Festival Proerosia’, Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 37, 319–79. (1999) ‘The Sequence of Days at the Thesmophoria and at the Eleusinian Mysteries’, Echos du Monde Classique: Classical Views 43(1) n.s. 18, 1–33. Robinson, E. W. (2011) Democracy beyond Athens: Popular Government in the Greek Classical Age. Cambridge. Ruscillo, D. (2013) ‘Thesmophoriazousai: Mytilenean Women and their Secret Rites’, in G. Ekroth and J. Wallensten (eds.) Bones, Behaviour and Belief:

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The Zooarchaeological Evidence as a Source for Ritual Practice in Ancient Greece and Beyond. Stockholm, 181–95. Salviat, F. (1958) ‘Une nouvelle Loi Thasienne: institution judiciares et fêtes religieuses à la fin du IVe siècle av. J.-C.’, Bulletin de correspondance hellénique 82, 193–267. Sandbach, F. H. (1967) Plutarchi Moralia Volume 7. Leipzig. Sfameni Gasparro, G. (2009) ‘Aspects of the Cult of Demeter in Magna Graecia: The “Case” of San Nicola di Albanella’, in G. Casadio and P. A. Johnston (eds.) Mystic Cults in Magna Graecia. Austin, Tex., 139–60. Shepherd, G. (2005) ‘Dead Men Tell No Tales: Ethnic Diversity in Sicilian Colonies and the Evidence of the Cemeteries’, Oxford Journal of Archaeology 24(2), 115–36. (2015) ‘Magna Graecia (South Italy and Sicily)’, in E. Eidinow and J. Kindt (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Greek Religion. Oxford, 567–87. Simms, R. M. (1998) ‘The Phrearrhian Lex Sacra: An Interpretation’, Hesperia 67 (1), 91–107. Simon, E. (1983) Festivals of Attica: An Archaeological Commentary. Madison, Wis. Sokolowski, F. (1971) ‘On the lex sacra of the Deme Phrearrhioi’, Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 12, 217–20. Solez, K. (2018) ‘Megarian Myths: Extrapolating the Narrative Traditions of Megara’, in H. Beck and P. J. Smith (eds.) Megarian Moments: The Local World of an Ancient Greek City-State. Montreal, 77–96. Sourvinou-Inwood, C. (1978) ‘Persephone and Aphrodite at Locri: A Model for Personality Definitions in Greek Religion’, The Journal of Hellenic Studies 98, 101–21. Spatafora, F. (2016) Il Thesmophorion di Entella. Scavi in Contrada Petraro. Pisa. Stallsmith, A. B. (2009) ‘Interpreting the Athenian Thesmophoria’, Classical Bulletin 84, 28–45. Stehle, E. (2007) ‘Thesmophoria and Eleusinian Mysteries: The Fascination with Women’s Secret Ritual’, in M. Parca and A. Tzanetou (eds.) Finding Persephone: Women’s Rituals in the Ancient Mediterranean. Bloomington, Ind. and Indianapolis, Ind., 165–85. Theodoridis, C. (ed.) (1982–2013) Photii Patriarchae Lexicon, 3 volumes. Berlin. Thompson, H. A. (1936) ‘Pnyx and Thesmophorion’, Hesperia 5(2), 151–200. Trümpy, C. (2004) ‘Die Thesmophoria, Brimo, Deo und das Anaktoron: Beobachtungen zur Vorgeschichte des Demeterkults’, Kernos 17, 13–42. Versnel, H. S. (1993) Inconsistencies in Greek and Roman Religion: Transition and Reversal in Myth and Ritual. Leiden. Walz, C. (1832–36) Rhetores Graeci, 9 volumes. Stuttgart and Tübingen. White, D. (1964) ‘Demeter’s Sicilian Cult as a Political Instrument’, Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 5(4), 261–79. (1984) The Extramural Sanctuary of Demeter and Persephone at Cyrene, Libya. Final Reports. Volume I: Background and Introduction to the Excavations. Philadelphia, Pa.

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Whitehead, D. (1986) The Demes of Attica, 508/7–ca. 250 BC: A Political and Social Study. Princeton, N.J. Winkler, J. J. (1990) The Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece. London. Wittgenstein, L. (1953) Philosophical Investigations. Oxford. Zeitlin, F. I. (1982) ‘Cultic Models of the Female: Rites of Dionysus and Demeter’, Arethusa 15, 129–57. (1996) Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature. Chicago, Ill.

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The Lindian Chronicle and Local Identity  

This chapter returns to the question of how the local and the general dimensions of ancient Greek religion come together in a particular time and place: in this case, that of the Greek island of Rhodes in the southeastern Aegean during the late Classical and Hellenistic periods. The island housed a polis of the same name that had emerged through a synoikism of three separate cities: Ialysos, Kameiros, and Lindos. McInerney puts the focus squarely on the role of the Lindos Chronicle as a powerful tool to reassert older local identities within a new (pan-Rhodian) context. Through a careful study of the claims and assertions made in different sections of the Chronicle, McInerney visualises different kinds of negotiations between local and general identities at work. In his contribution, the federal city of Rhodes features once as the larger dimension in interaction with which the Lindians sought to maintain their local identity, and once as the local dimension itself that sought to assert its place in negotiation with even larger entities and identities (such as Rome). This shift in focus confirms that the local and the general are ultimately relational categories, the meaning of which changes according to what level of Greek society we look at. The study shows in impressive detail that the local dimension of ancient Greek religion, far from being a static category, was constantly negotiated and re-negotiated. In the case of post-synoikism Rhodes and, in particular, the efforts of the Lindians to retain a distinct local presence as part of the new city, the dynamics between localising and generalising forces mentioned in Julia Kindt’s opening chapter come particularly clearly to the fore.

Introduction: Local Religion and Global Pressure

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After the synoikism of the Rhodian cities of Lindos, Kameiros and Ialysos in 408 BCE, the new federal city of Rhodes, located on the northern tip of the island, profited from its advantageous position to take control of much of the trade back and forth between the eastern Mediterranean and the

The Lindian Chronicle and Local Identity

Aegean.1 Nevertheless, local identities remained vital and distinctive in the older cities of Rhodes. In fact, the most fully realised assertion of communal identity to survive from Hellenistic Rhodes was a document primarily concerned with local identity: the Lindos Chronicle. It is here that we witness the continuing process of identity formation articulated through a mixture of time, memory, and place specific not to Rhodes but to Lindos. In this paper I wish to explore the Chronicle of Lindos through the lens of localism, showing how prestige and status operate at the local level, as well as at the regional and international levels.2 The Chronicle cannot be treated separately from the Sanctuary of Athena Lindia, where it was displayed, and cult practices focused on the hieron of Athena Lindia were the anchor of Lindian identity. Yet while we can certainly imagine sacrifices, pompai, cult buildings and prominent funerary markers – all the familiar expressions of Greek piety and religious performance – helping to constitute the Lindian community, the Chronicle of Lindos allows us to see local religion intersecting with other spheres as well: the preservation and creation of memory, and the fabrication of an archaic past reclaimed through archives and inscriptions.3 The Chronicle consistently asserts historical veracity and demonstrates a fanatical concern for exactitude. Both are indicators of the pressure on the cult of Athena Lindia as a local religious system to keep its place in the wider religious landscape of Hellenistic Rhodes.

Which Rhodes? Before turning to the inscription let us situate Rhodes and Lindos in their Hellenistic setting. In the closing years of the fifth century and in the first decade of the fourth century the new polity was riven by stasis, principally

1

2

3

Bringmann 2005. On the synoikism see Gabrielsen 2000 and on Rhodian identity see Constantakopoulou 2005. For treatments of Rhodes after the synoikism see Schmitt 1957; Berthold 1984; Gabrielsen 1997; Wiemer 2002; 2011. The literature on Rhodes prior to the synoikism is extensive. For recent discussions of Rhodes in earlier periods see Kourou 2003 and 2015, as well as Kousoulis 2012 and D’Acunto 2017. Badoud 2015 deals with many aspects of Rhodes’ history. For a penetrating analysis of local conditions in other Rhodian settings, notably at Kameiros, see Juliane Zachhuber’s essay in this volume, Chapter 9. For some of these conventional elements of Greek religious practice in a Lindian setting, see SEG 4.171, with updates in Gonzales 2008. The stipulations of the decree include the sacrifice of a boar, a dog, and a kid to Enyalios, a procession and the construction of an oikos for Enyalios. For the monumental tomb at Hagios Milianos at Lindos see Brouma 2000.

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between democrats and oligarchs of the Diagorid clan.4 Nevertheless, once the King’s Peace brought a degree of stability to the region, Rhodes was well placed to enjoy a period of prosperity. It was, in the words of H. D. Westlake, ‘a late developer’.5 With its powerful navy the city and island became a major actor in the early Hellenistic period, suppressing piracy and developing an extensive trade network in the eastern Mediterranean.6 In addition the Rhodians exercised direct control of a great swathes of territory on the mainland opposite, the Rhodian Peraia, creating a sphere of influence that Alain Bresson has called the ‘koinè du golfe Céramique’.7 Alone among the older states of Greece, Rhodes played a truly significant role in the great upheavals of the third century. As the broad outlines of Hellenistic power politics emerged from the wars of the Diadochoi and the consolidation of the Ptolemaic, Seleucid and Antigonid dynasties, Rhodes entered the scene as an old power reborn. The strength of the city and island’s position was perhaps best illustrated by the Rhodians’ ability to withstand the siege of Demetrios Poliorketes, who failed to capture the city of Rhodes in 304 BCE. In the aftermath of their survival of the siege, the Rhodians decided to erect a colossal statue made from the City-Besieger’s engines dedicated to the relatively new cult of Helios, the protector of the capital city, itself barely 100 years old. Incised on or near the base of the Colossus was this epigram: Αὐτῷ σοὶ πρὸς Ὄλυμπον ἐμακύναντο κολοσσόν τόνδε Ῥόδου ναέται Δωρίδος, Ἀέλιε, χάλκεον, ἁνίκα κῦμα κατευνάσαντες Ἐνυοῦς ἔστρεψαν πάτραν δυσμενέων ἐνάροις· οὐ γὰρ ὑπὲρ πελάγους μόνον ἄνθεσαν ἀλλὰ καὶ ἐν γᾷ ἁβρὸν ἀδουλώτου φέγγος ἐλευθερίας, τοῖς γὰρ ἀϕ᾿ Ἡρακλῆος ἀεξηθεῖσι γενέθλας πάτριος ἐν πόντῳ κἠν χθονὶ κοιρανία To you, O Sun, did the people of Dorian Rhodes raise high to the heavens this brazen colossus, then, having laid to rest the wave of war, they crowned their country with the spoils of their foes. Dedicating it not only over the sea, but on the land, too 4

5 6

7

Ancient sources: Hell. Oxy. 18.1–3 (Chambers); Xen. Hell. 4.8.20–25, 5.1.3–6; Diod. Sic. 14.97, 14.99.4–5. For discussion see Westlake 1983a; 1983b; David 1984; Simonton 2015. Westlake 1983a: 333. Honours voted by the Rhodians to Antigenes as navarch for the suppression of piracy: IG XI 4 596. Bresson 1991: 52. See also van Bremen 2007.

The Lindian Chronicle and Local Identity

they raised the splendid light of unenslaved freedom. For to those who spring from the race of Herakles a heritage both on land and sea is leadership.8

Hans-Ulrich Wiemer has correctly labelled this ‘a priceless document of Rhodian self-representation’.9 But which Rhodes? The entire island, imagined as a single community? Or the by-now 100-year-old city, the actual object of Demetrios’ attention? This is not simply a matter of confusing Rhodes town and Rhodes island; ignoring the difference risks losing sight of the dynamism of local practice and replacing it with a mirage of regional homogeneity. Wiemer’s study, like much research on Rhodes in the Hellenistic period, concentrates on Rhodes’ place in the international scene, when power was inexorably shifting from the Greek East to the Roman West. Against that backdrop, Rhodes is often described as if it were a single, uniform entity, like ‘Rome’, or ‘the Attalids’ or ‘the Ptolemies’. In that respect it lends itself to the unit-attribute approach to Hellenistic international affairs criticised by Arthur Eckstein for reducing analysis of the Hellenistic state system to the pathological ambitions of various individual monarchs.10 Each state is imagined as a discrete entity, a unit, and explanations of episodes arise from an analysis of the characteristics peculiar to that unit. A good example of this can be seen in Sheila Ager’s discussion of the role played by Rhodes as an honest broker between the superpowers. Ager describes Rhodian policy this way: ‘Having established her own sphere of interest in south-western Asia Minor and the Aegean, she also developed a policy of minimizing any interference within that sphere, hence her dedication to maintaining the independence and loyalty of the smaller states of the Aegean and Asia Minor.’11 Of course, such language has long been a feature of historical writing, and Ager’s valuable insights into the role played by Rhodes in the fraught area of Hellenistic diplomacy are not vitiated by the harmless trope of personifying Rhodes as the single actor. Yet there is a danger of such tropes subtly reinforcing the notion that Rhodes was a singularity, as if Ager’s ‘she’ refers to a single agent, rather than a composite comprised of different communities, sanctuaries, phylai, patrai, demes and ktoina, not to mention 8 9

10 11

Anth. Pal. 6.171. Transl. Wiemer. Wiemer 2011: 132. For further discussion see Miles 2015. The epigramme is usually assumed to be the authentic dedicatory inscription, carved around 280 BCE upon the completion of the Colossus. For scepticism regarding the date and authenticity of the inscription, see K. R. Jones 2014. See Eckstein 2006: 79–117, although Eckstein’s analysis is hardly free of the very same tendency. Ager 1991: 10 (emphasis added).

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classes, trades, professions, old aristocratic families and newly arrived merchants and traders.12 Panoptic histories often treat the eastern Mediterranean as a geopolitical chessboard, over which discrete pieces – the Senate, Ptolemy, Antiochus, Rhodes or Delos – move in an elaborate dance of political manoeuvring. Similarly, broad narratives of the Hellenistic period often reinforce a quasi-teleological view, a lens that sees all events from the point of view of the ‘Coming of Rome’, the title not only of Erich Gruen’s masterful study, but one also with a genuine pedigree: it could apply equally well to Polybios’ work. Lost in this approach are a number of salient features of life in Hellenistic Rhodes. One is that the three synoikising cities did not physically relocate to Rhodes town, but continued to exist, and indeed to thrive, during the third century and beyond.13 A second notable feature of the post-synoikism of Rhodes is that a great deal of the energy of Rhodian communal life remained focused not on foreign policy and the spectre of Rome, but on local religious practices. Robert Parker has noted, ‘As for post-synoecism Rhodes and Kos, a thoroughly vigorous municipal life persisted, and religious activity continued to be conducted, and organised, outside the new capital cities with remarkable commitment and vigour.’14 In fact, Beate Dignas views the synoikism as favouring the creation of a new cursus honorum, with the cult of Halios at the top but with each of the older cults of the constituent cities negotiating their position in relation to the new state-wide cult.15 The synoikism of Rhodes was not an inevitable evolutionary step in which older communities were incorporated and swallowed up into a new megastate, but rather a negotiated and contingent process in which power, status and authority flowed back and forth between the federated city of Rhodes and the still quite viable older communities of Ialysos, Kameiros and Lindos. The local remained very much alive in federated Rhodes.

The Lindian Chronicle and the Tangible Past This lengthy inscription dates from 99 BCE and is a catalogue of the temple treasures of Athena Lindia.16 The inscription is inscribed on a marble stēlē 12

13 16

Pugliese Carratelli 1951; 1953; 1957; Andrewes 1957; N. Jones 1987: 242–52; Papachristodoulou 1999; Maillot 2015; Thomsen 2017. 14 15 Dignas 2003: 36. Parker 2009: 193. Dignas 2003. See Blinkenberg 1915; Higbie 2003; Massar 2006 and BNJ 532. Unless otherwise indicated, I give here the text and translations from BNJ (Higbie).

The Lindian Chronicle and Local Identity

Figure 8.1 Arrangement of text on the Lindian Temple Chronicle. A = prescript, B and C = list of votive offerings, D = epiphanies. After I.Lindos fig. 1. Courtesy: The National Museum of Copenhagen inv. 7125.

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(2.37 m high, 0.85 m wide, 0.32 m deep) and is divided into four areas (Fig. 8.1). It opens with a twelve-line prescript (Section A) which extends the full width of the inscribed surface, authorising the selection of two anagrapheis, Tharsagoras and Timachadas, named in line 12.17 The prescript also records details regarding the payment for the inscription and penalty clauses for failure to fulfil its stipulations. Below the prescript are three columns of text. Columns B and C contain at least 115 and 130 preserved lines of inventory with details of votive offerings. Column D contains details of multiple epiphanies of the goddess. Temple inventories are, of course, one of the oldest genres of public record in the Greek world, but the Lindos Chronicle is unique.18 Everything the catalogue records had already been destroyed when the inventory was inscribed, much of it probably in a fire dated to 392/391 BCE, so the Chronicle of Lindos is not like the inventories of Asklepios from Athens, the Parthenon accounts, or the accounts of the Brauronion, which recorded actual dedications that could be compared to the epigraphic record. The Lindos inscription emphasises that the dedications recorded on the stone had themselves been lost over time. Accordingly, the Lindos Chronicle is actually a virtual catalogue of objects whose existence had been recovered, as it were, by archival research. This phantom inventory reflects a clear historical self-awareness.19 By linking dedications to Athena Lindia to major episodes and figures from myth-history, such as the Telchines, Minos, and the Trojan War, the Chronicle fabricates a virtual yet lapidary sequence that situates Lindos within a great web of cultural associations. It is too easy to dismiss the evident fabrications of the Chronicle’s inventory as what Borges, in his preface to a superficially similar Book of Imaginary Beings, called ‘the lazy pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way erudition’.20 This is

17

18

19

20

On the quotation practices of Tharsagoras and Timachidas see Amendola 2014. For a discussion of Timachidas rejecting the usual identification of the anagrapheus with the wellknown Hellenistic poet see Matijašić 2014. On inventories and chronicles see Blinkenberg 1915, Jacoby FGrH 532 and more recently Higbie BNJ 532. On the notion of the Lindos Chronicle as evidence for the concept of a historical museum, see Shaya 2005; 2015a; 2015b. The idea is dismissed by Hölscher 2018: 288, who remarks, ‘Yet there is no indication whatsoever that in the temple these objects were ordered according to a historical concept and not – which seems much more probable – just kept and displayed as precious offerings, together with many other votive offerings of minor importance, as in any other temple.’ Even if this is true of the original objects, it is certainly not true of the virtual catalogue created from the archives, which is organised chronologically. Borges 1970: 11.

The Lindian Chronicle and Local Identity

erudition with a purpose: to prove with utter conviction the importance of Lindos.21 The emphasis on the deep past is announced in line two as the inscription connects the sanctuary’s status to its antiquity: (2) ἐπεὶ τὸ ἰερὸ]ν τᾶς ᾽Αθάνας τᾶς Λινδίας ἀρχαιότατόν τε καὶ ἐντιμό[τα] (3) τὸν ὑπάρχον πολλοῖς κ[αὶ καλοῖς ἀναθέμασι ἐκ παλαιοτ]άτων χρόνων κεκόσμηται διὰ τὰν τᾶς θεοῦ ἐπιφάνειαν . . . (2) since the hieron of Athena the Lindian, both the most archaic and the most venerable (3) in existence, has been adorned with many beautiful offerings from the earliest times on account of the visible presence of the goddess . . .22

But time is a wrecker, and there is a danger of this connection to deep antiquity being lost: (4) συμβαίνει δὲ τῶν ἀνα[θεμάτων τὰ πλεῖστα μετὰ τᾶν αὐτῶν ἐ]πιγραφᾶν διὰ τὸν χρόνον ἐφθάρθαι, τύχαι ἀγαθᾶι δεδόχθαι (5) [μ]αστροῖς καὶ Λινδίοις κυρ[ωθέντος τοῦδε τοῦ ψαφίσματος ἑλέ]σθαι ἄνδρας δύο, τοὶ δὲ αἱρεθέντες κατασκευαξάντω στάλαν (6) [λί]θου Λαρτίου καθ᾽ ἅ κα ὁ ἀρχ[ιτέκτων γράψηι καὶ ἀναγραψάντ]ω εἰς αὐτὰν τόδε τὸ ψάφισμα . . . (4) and since it happens that the most ancient of the offerings together with their inscriptions have been destroyed on account of time, it has been resolved with the presumption of good fortune (5) by the mastroi and the Lindians, with the authorisation of this decree, that two men be selected. Let these men, once selected, set up a stēlē (6) of stone from Lartos according to what the architect writes and let them inscribe on it this decree . . .

In place of the objects themselves, a rich layer of documentary and historiographic research attests to the missing objects and permits their (re)appearance in the Chronicle. These attestations come from the work of men like Gorgon, Gorgosthenes and more than twenty others, whose works were vital to the Chronicle’s project. 21

22

Another recent work of convincing fabrication is Damien Hirst’s exhibition and documentary, Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable. One credulous viewer remarked on the exhibition’s ability to capture ‘the desire to believe the incredible and extraordinary’. The Mastroi of Lindos would surely have agreed. I owe this reference to Arielle Hardy. BNJ 532 F1.

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Archives and Intentional History Author

Work

Gorgon

About Rhodes

Gorgosthenes (the priest of Athena)

letter to the boulē

Hieroboulos (a priest of Athena)

letter to the mastroi

Xenagoras

Annalistic Account

Nikasylos

Annalistic Account

Hegesias

Encomium of Rhodes

Aielouros

About the War against the Exagiades

Phainnos

About Lindos

Eudemos

Lindiaka

Theotimos

Against Aielouros

Hieron

About Rhodes

Timokritos

Annalistic Account

Polyzalos

Historiai

Herodotus

Historiai

Hagelokhos

Annalistic Account

Aristion

Annalistic Account

Aristonymos

Collection of Dates

Onomastos

Annalistic Account

Myron

Encomium of Rhodes

Hieronymos

Heliaka

Ergias

Historiai

Zenon

Annalistic Account

Hagestratos

Annalistic Account

The list of the historians and priests whose works were consulted by the anagrapheis who compiled the objects of the Chronicle is exhaustive, and illustrates Rosalind Thomas’ point regarding local history writing: aside from the writers of Horoi, there appear to have been ‘about 500 named writers of polis, or local histories’, whose works displayed a dizzying array of approaches to dating, chronological arrangement, foundations, myth,

The Lindian Chronicle and Local Identity

cult, and sacrifice.23 Within this highly varied array of styles and approaches, the Lindos Chronicle is unique in deploying the genre of temple-inventory to situate contemporary Lindian identity within a web of myth.24 And in addition to these named individuals there are also references to The Lindian Khrematismoi (Public Records), which contained details of recent dedications by Hellenistic kings. Many of these sources are cited more than once; one, Xenagoras, is cited nineteen times. But most are quite obscure, and their works, generally speaking, appear to have been local histories that connected the contemporary world of Rhodes to the deep mythic past of the Trojan War and the almost equally distant time of the Rhodian participation in the colonisation of Sicily. It is easy for us to underestimate the sheer volume of such local writing, and its significance. However, a territorial dispute between Samos and Priene which simmered for a century was finally resolved when the two sides presented no fewer than seven local histories to bolster their cases.25 The Lindos Chronicle is therefore not only a testament to the persistence of Rhodian cult; it is also proof of a vigorous documentary tradition, often deployed, ironically, to give factual support to the most factitious claims.26 In short, the appeal to a wide variety of historiographic sources used to demonstrate Rhodes’ involvement in the world of gods and Homeric heroes is a strategy designed to prove Rhodes’ significance and, by extension, Lindos’ privileged place. This is a good example of what HansJoachim Gehrke has called ‘intentional history’, usefully defined by Foxhall and Luraghi as ‘the projection in time of the elements of subjective, selfconscious self-categorisation which construct the identity of a group as a group’.27 Quite simply, the inventory graphically demonstrates, from a Rhodian perspective, why Lindos mattered. Take, for example, the very first dedication in col. B: Τοίδε ἀνέθηκαν τᾶι ᾽Αθάναι· (I) Λίνδος φιάλαν, ἃν οὐδεὶς ἐδύνατο γνώμειν / ἐκ τίνος ἐστί, ἐφ᾽ ἇς ἐπεγέγραπτο «Λίνδος / ᾽Αθάναι Πολιάδι καὶ Διὶ Πολιεῖ», ὡ[ς] ἱστορεῖ Γόρ / γων, ἐν τᾶι ᾱ τᾶν Περὶ ῾Ρόδου, Γορ[γ]οσθένης ὁ ἰε / ρεὺς τᾶς ᾽Αθάνας ἐν τᾶι ποτὶ τὰν βουλὰν ἐπι/ [ στ]ολᾶι, Ἰερόβουλος ἰερεὺς καὶ αὐτὸς ὑπάρ / χω[ν] ἐν τᾶι ποτὶ τοὺς μαστροὺς ἐπιστολᾶι. 23

24 26

27

Thomas 2014: 156. For surveys of Rhodian historiography in the Hellenistic period and the intersection with the Lindian Chronicle see Carlini 2014 and Salati 2014. 25 Massar 2006. Clarke 2008: 314–15. On polis history or local history, see Thomas 2014: 169: ‘A city’s history and traditions were part of its importance, its identity, and a tool in the political, cultural, and religious life of the city.’ On intentional history, see Gehrke 2010, especially 26–31, and Luraghi 2010: 252–60. The definition is from Foxhall and Luraghi 2010: 1.

241

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The following made dedications to Athena: Lindos, a phialē. No one was able to discover / what it is (made) from, but on it had been inscribed: ‘Lindos / to Athena Polias and Zeus Polieus’, as Gorgon reports / in his investigations in the eleventh book of his work About Rhodes, / Gorgosthenes the priest of Athena in his letter to the boulē, / Hieroboulos himself also a priest in his letter to the mastroi.

The anagrapheis Tharsagoras and Timakhidas were able to track down this simulacrum of a phialē, a gift from the city’s oikist, in the pages of Gorgon, who composed a history of Rhodes, as well as in the letter of Gorgosthenes to the boulē, and in another letter from another priest Hieroboulos to the Mastroi. The lemma is distinctive in many respects. The observation that research has not disclosed what the phialē was made from paradoxically reinforces the impression of the phialē as a real object; one cannot try to discover what an object is made of without assuming that there is an object in the first place. Second, the appeal to the authority of at least three reputable sources places the phialē within a stratigraphy of different pasts: the recent past includes the work of Gorgon, cited as a source by the Chronicle at least fifteen times, second only to Xenagoras.28 A middle past is associated with Gorgosthenes and Hieroboulos, priests of Athena Lindia who composed their letters after the fire that destroyed the early temple and many of its treasures around 392 BCE. If Blinkenberg’s suggestion is correct, that the destruction of the temple treasures prompted the priests of the sanctuary to prepare reports to the magistrates and council of Lindos offering details of what had been lost, the virtual phialē recreates the actual object which had existed up until 200 years earlier.29 As for the plupast, that is to say, a past which has already passed before even the existence of the records on which the Chronicle draws, it is entirely missing, because the present phialē resurrects the ‘original’ gift of Lindos, collapsing the gap between that bygone heroic era and the present.30 28

29

30

On Gorgon, see BNJ 515 (Higbie), largely recapitulating the information in Higbie 2003: 66. Although his dates are not certain, references to him in later authors would be consistent with a floruit in the first century BCE. The inclusion of non-existent objects in the Chronicle conceals the fate of objects that had probably been melted down to mint coinage at the time of the siege of Rhodes by Demetrios Poliorketes. See Zachhuber in this volume, Chapter 9, as well as Bresson 2006: 545–46 and Badoud 2015: 80–82. The listing of an (in)tangible object occludes a messier history of loss, destruction, and transformation. For definition and discussion of the concept of the plupast, see Grethlein and Krebs 2012. It is beyond the scope of this paper, but the ‘objects’ listed in the Lindian Chronicle would appear to illustrate a key tenet of post-Heideggerian Object-Oriented Ontology, ‘finitude’, the notion that there is a gap between an object and our knowledge of it. For a stimulating discussion of spatial and temporal separations between object and observer, see Harman 2011: 42. In Heidegger’s ontology the absence of the phialē and its recreation as lemma might be considered a kind of

The Lindian Chronicle and Local Identity

It is surely because the Chronicle’s entries flatten time so insistently that, at times, the lemmata assume the shape and size of footnotes running amok. When, for example, the Chronicle reports two shields which had been dedicated by Herakles, the authorities cited read as follows: ἐπὶ δὲ τοῦ κατακε / χαλκωμένου «Τὰν Λαομέδοντος ῾Ηρακλῆς ἀ / πὸ Τεύκρων ᾽Αθάναι Πολιάδι καὶ Διὶ Πολιεῖ», / ὡς ἀποφαίνεται Ξεναγόρας ἐν τᾶι ᾱ τᾶς / [χ]ρονικᾶς συντάξιος, Γόργων ἐν τᾶι ᾱ τᾶν / Περὶ ῾Ρόδου, Νικασύλος ἐν τᾶι γ̄ τᾶς χρονι / κᾶς συντάξιος, ῾Ηγησίας ἐν τῶι ῾Ρόδου ἐγκω / μίωι, Αἰέλουρος ἐν τῶι Περὶ τοῦ ποτὶ τοὺς / Ἐξαγιάδας πολέμου , Φάεννος ἐν τῶι Περὶ / Λίνδου, Γοργοσθένης ἐν τᾶι ἐπιστολᾶι, / Ἰερόβουλος ἐν τᾶι ἐπιστολᾶι. On the one of bronze, / ‘The [shield] of Laomedon, Herakles from / the Teucrians, to Athena Polias and Zeus Polieus’, / as Xenagoras declares in the first book of his / Annalistic Account, Gorgon in the first book of his work / About Rhodes, Nikasylos in the third book of his Annalistic Account, / Hegesias in his Encomium of Rhodes, / Aieluros in his work About the War against the / Exagiades, Phaennos in his work / About Lindos, Gorgosthenes in his letter, / Hierobulos in his letter.

This obsessive layering of source upon source has attracted comment from Jean-Michel Bertrand and John Dillery, who see it as a strategy of legitimation. As Dillery notes, ‘[T]he combination of sources, the way they mutually reinforce each other . . . and their very variety are for the Rhodians essential in establishing the veracity and importance of their temple and dedications.’31 This is undoubtedly true, but the ‘veracity and importance’ Dillery identifies are also tied to the presence of the goddess, whose epiphanies, attested in col. D, are in counterpoint to the long diachronic history recorded in the Chronicle. As present when the Persians invade under Datis as when Demetrios was besieging the city (Rhodes, but not named), Athena is always at hand, existing in illo tempore. This is a useful paradox for the Lindians, linking the apparent temporality of the objects and their diverse biographies with an eternal and therefore contemporary divine presence. This mania for citation is also testimony to the very real closeness between the Lindian Chronicle and a richly encomiastic tradition of Rhodian historiography devoted, not unexpectedly, to the glorification of all things Rhodian.32 Even as early as the second century BCE, Polybios could find fault with the Rhodian historian Zenon for being more concerned with style than accuracy, and for allowing patriotism to influence his treatment of

31 32

transition from the Unzuhandenheit of the destroyed object to a facsimile of Zuhandenheit (Readiness-to-hand). For a treatment of these categories, see Dotray 2010. Dillery 2005: 515. See also Betrand 1992: 25–26. Funke 1994; Wiemer 2001: 19–32; Salati 2014.

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sea-battles that involved Rhodian forces.33 The newly discovered fragment of a Diadochan history by a Rhodian author also shows that Rhodians were proud to demonstrate that their state was a player on the international stage.34 In the Lindian Chronicle, historiography, cult, myth, and the display of a monumental inventory-text combine to make a claim for Lindos’ distinctive, well-established place in what Eckstein has called the ‘anarchic structure of interstate relations in the Hellenistic Age’.35

Cities and Tribes But there remains the bifurcation of Rhodes, the island, and Rhodes, the megalopolis. Rhodes is a singularity in relation to Rome, Alexandria or Pergamon, but on Rhodes there are plenty of significant places that are not the town of Rhodes, and Lindos is one of them. The Chronicle presented the priests of Athena Lindia with an opportunity to stake a very particular place in the Hellenic world not just for Rhodes in general, but specifically for Lindos. As ever, the myth-geography and genealogy of the Homeric world are the starting point. The donors in column B include Lindos, the Telchines, Kadmos, Minos, Herakles, Tlapolemos, Rhesos, Telephos, Menelaos, Helen, Kanopos, Meriones, Teuker, Aretakritos and the Lindian colonists to Kyrene. The prevalent tendency in this list is antiquarian. Lindos, the eponymous hero of the town, heads the list, but we have no mention of the other eponyms, Kameiros or Ialysos, the other sons of Helios and Rhodos in the island’s official genealogy. Other figures here locate Lindos, the town and sanctuary, in the great Panhellenic web of myth centred on the Trojan War. Homeric heroes such as Rhesos, Menelaos, Meriones and Teuker occur in the list of dedicators, and many of the supposed dedications forge spurious links between these figures and Athena: Minos dedicates a silver drinking cup to Athena Polias, the tutelary deity; Herakles dedicates the bronze shield of Laomedon, inscribed ‘from the Teukrians, to Athena Polias and Zeus Polieus’; Telephos offers a gold phialē to Athena; Helen dedicates a pair of bracelets inscribed ‘Helen to Athena’, and so on.36 This is the Lindian version of ‘proving’ that it intersects with the Trojan War, the ultimate legitimator for a place in the Greek network, through these gifts. 33 34

35

Polyb. 16.17.8. See also the comments of Champion in BNJ 523 T4. P. Köln no. 247. On the Köln papyrus, see Funke 1994: 260–61, following the interpretation of Lehmann 1988. 36 Eckstein 2006: 79. Cols. B 18–19; B 28; B 48; B 70–71.

The Lindian Chronicle and Local Identity

The references to the Trojan War also take on a local inflection, when the Chronicle makes reference to Tlapolemos and the men who fought with him at Troy.37 Tlapolemos is not a major figure in the Iliad, but he figures in the Catalogue of Ships where the tripartite division of the island’s contingent appears to reflect the pre-synoikistic arrangement of Rhodes.38 His inclusion reflects an awareness of the value of a Homeric pedigree. In fact, the Homeric references to Rhodes shed more light on both the organisation of the early state and the evocation of this in the Chronicle. At Iliad 2.655 Homer refers to the inhabitants dwelling in Rhodes διὰ τρίχα and names the three cities of Kameiros, Ialysos and Lindos. Thirteen lines later he refers to the settlers dwelling τριχθά and καταφυλαδόν. These references have usually been interpreted to mean that each of the three original cities was divided into three phylai. Presumably these three tribes were, as they were in so many Dorian cities, labelled Hylleis, Dymanes and Pamphyloi.39 In the post-synoikised state, however, these names do not occur, and Kameiros, Ialysos and Lindos themselves served as the three tribes of the federal state of Rhodes. Functionally this tripartite division supported the rotation of the key federal office, the priesthood of the cult of Halios, and was also reflected in the organisation of federal festivals, similarly structured around competition between the three tribes. The principle of tripartition, accordingly, was well established on Rhodes.40 The importance of this is reflected at Lindos after federation, not only in the triennial rotation of demes supplying the priests of Athena Lindia, but also in the appearance in the Chronicle of three tribes known as Haliadai, Autochthones and Telchines. Yet the Chronicle is the only place where these names occur, and Nicholas Jones has argued convincingly that they are not true tribes in the sense of ‘public units’. The names do not occur outside the Chronicle and are not consistent with the one Lindian tribe epigraphically attested after synoikism: Argeia.41 It is possible that they are social groups, like the better-attested patrai found throughout Rhodes, but a more plausible explanation is that they are entirely fictitious. They are retrojections back into an earlier period of tribal groups and serve as anchors for the Chronicle’s shaping of ‘memory’ into local identity. The names occur in column B, lines 88–100, where the entry recording their dedication reads: Τᾶν φυλᾶν ἑκάστα πίνακα [παναρχ]αϊκόν, ἐν ὧι ἦν / ἐζωγραφημένος φύλαρχος καὶ δρομεῖς ἐννῆ, / πάντες ἀρχαϊκῶς ἔχοντες τοῖ σχήμασι, ὧν ἑκά / στου

37 40

38 39 Cols. B 54–61. Hom. Il. 2.653–70. N. Jones 1987: 242–51; Higbie 2003: 94. 41 Morricone 1949–51; Fraser 1953. N. Jones 1987: 249–50. For Argeia, see Lindos II. 199.

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246

  ἐπεγέγραπτο τ[ᾶ]ι εἰκόνι τὸ ὄνομα, κ[αὶ] ἐ / πὶ μὲν τοῦ ἑνὸς τῶν π[ιν]ά[κ]ων ἐπεγέγραπτο· «῾Αλιαδᾶν φυλὰ νικάσ[ασ᾽ ἀν]έθηκε τᾶι Λινδίαι / ᾽Αθάναι», ἐφ᾽ ἑτέρου δὲ «Νίκας τόδ᾽ ἐστὶ σᾶμα· τῶν / Αὐτοχθόνων φυλὰ κρατήσασ᾽ ἀγλάϊε τὰ[ν] θεόν», / ἐπὶ δὲ τοῦ τρίτου «Τελχείνων φυλὰ νικῶσ᾽ ἀνέθ[η] / κεν ᾽Αθάναι, Λυκωπάδας δὲ ὁ Λυγκέως παῖς ἐλαμ / παδάρχει». Each of the phylai, a most ancient plaque. On which was painted a phylarchos and nine dromeis, all holding archaic stances; on the image of each of them had been inscribed the name and on the first of the pinakes had been inscribed: ‘The phylē of the Haliadai, having conquered, dedicated [this] to Athena the Lindian.’ On the second, ‘This is the sign of victory; the phylē of the / Autochthones, having prevailed, adorned the goddess.’ On the third, ‘The phylē of the Telchines, conquering, dedicated [this] to Athena; Lycopadas the son of Lyceus was leader of the torchlight procession.’

Coming immediately after the Trojan War entries and before the references to the Lindians’ colonial expeditions, the record of the tribal plaques is clearly meant to impress the reader with the tribes’ antiquity. Not only are they explicitly called [παναρχ]αϊκόν, but even the runners’ stances are described as archaic, all the more interesting given this ekphrasis is entirely divorced from any actual plaques. Assuming that their historicity is unlikely, their names reflect the values of the time when the Chronicle was inscribed: the Haliadai proclaim their special relationship with Helios, whose cult was the most important of the federal state; the Autochthones assert their indigeneity, and the Telchines proclaim a lineage that takes them back to a tradition of the mythic master-craftsmen who had cared for the infant Zeus. These are the familiar ingredients of ethnogenesis in the Hellenistic age, a mixture of exogenous foundation narratives that reach back to the hallowed past by way of Greek myth combined with assertions of aboriginality. The same formula lies behind the inscription known as the Pride of Halikarnassos, which uses the same ingredients to fashion a Halikarnassian identity.42 Indigeneity (conveyed by the story of Salmakis and Hermaphroditos), myths of the Telchines and references to a cult of venerable status (in this case that of Poseidon, administered by the Antheadai, whose origins are from Troizen) are similarly deployed in neighbouring Halikarnassos, at around the same time the Lindian Chronicle was inscribed and erected. Both inscriptions appear to have arisen from the same tendency to project local identities back and to anchor them in the deep past. Even so, the ‘tribal plaque’ referred to in 42

On the Pride of Halikarnassos, see Isager 1998; Lloyd-Jones 1999a; 1999b; and most recently Santini 2016 and 2017. For parallels with the Lindian Chronicle see McInerney 2021.

The Lindian Chronicle and Local Identity

the Lindian Chronicle raises some questions that defy easy answers. Why is there only a single victory recorded for each tribe? Is each plaque intended to stand metonymically for all the victories ever won by that tribe? And if we question the existence of these three ‘tribes’, whose names are unattested before the synoikism and whose associations fit better the Rhodes which came after synoikism, were there ever any plaques at all? If there were, were they fabrications after synoikism, designed to give post-synoikism institutions a fake patina of respectability? (In this case the tribes may be invented but the plaques were real objects.) Or is the lemma describing the plaques itself a fabrication, a product of the early first century?43 Since the entry in the Chronicle lists sources for this information (the ever-present and otherwise largely unknown Gorgon and Xenagoras), postulating that the Chronicle’s information regarding the tribes is fabricated raises the ugly possibility that it is fakes, rather than turtles, all the way down. Whether the fabrication occurred in the original temple dedications before the fire or in the creation of the inventory, the urge to forge a connection between late Hellenistic Lindos and the deep past is unmistakeable.

Spatium Mythicum and Spatium Historicum The reference to the phylai occurs immediately after the end of the Trojan War entries, and at this point a structural order seems to emerge from the Chronicle. What follows appears to be a dedication related to the Theban Cycle (a dedication from Adrastos commemorating the death of his son Aigialaus) after which the entries shift to dedications originating in the setting of Rhodian maritime expeditions and colonies: to Crete (Aretakritos); to Kyrene (the Lindian colonists led by the children of Pankis); to Lykia, led by Kleoboulos; to Phaselis (a dedication by the Phaselitai, led by the oikist Lakios); to Gela (a dedication by the Geloians, a colony sent out by Lindos); to Sybaris (a wooden cow and calf dedicated by Amphinomos and his sons); to Akragas (a dedication by Phalaris); once again to Gela (a dedication by Deinomenes, described as a Lindian). The colonial list is interrupted by the mention of a dedication by Amasis, but this is less anomalous than it may appear at first sight: if there is a hint of commercial networks behind the dedications then it makes sense that Egypt would receive a mention. In the period after 167 BCE when Rhodes’ preeminence in the east Mediterranean was challenged by the rise of tax-free 43

On the phylai and pinakes as falsifications, see Cannistraci 2014.

247

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Delos, Rhodian trading interests looked to Egypt and saw a surge in Rhodian trade along the routes to the south-east resulting in a veritable monopoly of amphora-based trade with Alexandria.44 The dedications then resume their western provenance: the settlers of Akragas dedicate a Palladion to commemorate their defeat of Minoa, followed by more Geloan dedications. Another apparent digression comes in an account of dedications by a Persian general, before once again we go west to Sicily: a dedication by the people of Soloi. The net effect is to situate Lindos first in a Trojan War setting, what Katherine Clarke would term spatium mythicum, and then to chart a place for Lindos in an equally charged and equally flexible spatium historicum: the Archaic Mediterranean. The Chronicle puts Lindos at the symbolic centre of a network of affiliations that extend from Persia to Sicily (Fig. 8.2).45 This is a network constituted by two spheres of action that seem independent, yet are in fact recursively linked in the ancient Mediterranean: trade and religion. Goods flow around the Mediterranean, usually from east to west, but the stages of this flow are marked not only by the presence of trade goods in new markets but even more by dedications left by traders in sanctuaries at various emporia: from central Italian dedications at Perachora, to Phoenician dedications at Kition on Cyprus, and so forth. As a result, major sanctuaries always have an international dimension, serving as entrepots for goods and sites for dedications from far afield, while also serving local and regional communities. Katherine Clarke has explored the ways that objects like the Lindos Chronicle and the Parian Marble monumentalise the shared memories of Greek poleis, and she argues that we should see the Chronicle not merely as a temple inventory but as a vigorous assertion of local identity.46 The usual context supposed for this is the fluctuation of fortunes experienced by the Rhodians in the Hellenistic period. On the one side was the scaling up of power on the island of Rhodes, its Peraia, and more broadly in the region of Karia in the early Hellenistic period.47 This was followed by what Berthold described as the long twilight after 167 BCE and the rearrangement of the eastern Mediterranean engineered by the Roman Senate in the wake of the Third Macedonian War.48 The turning point came in 167/166 BCE, when, according to Polybios, the Romans reacted to rumours that the Rhodians

44 45 47

Lund 1999; Sauer 2018: 36. On a Rhodian network and Athena Lindia, see Ampolo 2014. Fraser and Bean 1954; Bresson 1999; Reger 1999; Bresson 2003.

46

Clarke 2008: 321–38. Gruen 1975.

48

The Lindian Chronicle and Local Identity

Figure 8.2 The geography of the Lindian Chronicle. Circles indicate the cities of dedicants, triangles mark the provenance of the offerings. From Ampolo 2014: 531.

had cooperated with Rome’s enemy, Perseus.49 Delos was shortly thereafter declared a tax-free port by the Romans with catastrophic consequences for the Rhodians. According to Polybios their annual revenues plummeted from one million drachmas to 150,000.50 Yet there is much in this narrative that is oversimplified, and the claim that the Lindian Chronicle is an example of the interplay of memory and identity politics in the Greek cities of the Hellenistic world as they faced growing Roman hegemony runs the risk of relying upon an interpretatio romana. Should we see the identity politics of the region and period driving the small Greek poleis, as Caroline Higbie says, ‘to find a place for themselves in a world increasingly dominated politically and militarily by Rome’?51 Instead of seeing the Lindos Chronicle emerging from an anxiety about Rome, a catch-all explanation that has been used to explain everything from Plutarch’s ‘Parallel Lives’ to the ‘Roman Oration’ of Aelius Aristides, we should look at it as a document

49 51

50 Polyb. 30.5.12. Polyb. 30.31.10–12. See Gabrielsen 1997: 67–69 and Rauh 1999. Higbie in BNJ. In similar fashion Shaya 2005: 425 finds that the Lindos Chronicle ‘attested to this community’s cultural importance in the face of encroaching Roman hegemony’. Contra, Rendina 2014.

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composed in response to a whole cluster of local geopolitical anxieties.52 Prominent among these is the tension on Rhodes between centripetality (unification under the authority of Rhodes town) and centrifugality (the assertion of a separate and distinct Lindian identity). Possibly the starkest expression of the fierce hold of local identity is an inscription from Lindos from 320 BCE.53 Having recorded the names of thirty adjudicators, the inscription then records their accomplishments as follows: ἄνδρες ἀγαθοὶ ἐγένοντο συνδιαφυλάξαντες ̣ Λινδίοις ὅπως ταὶ αἱρέσιες γίνωνται ἐν Λίνδωι τῶν ἱερέων κ[αὶ] ἱεροθυτᾶν κα[ὶ] ἱεροποιῶν καὶ τῶν ἄλλων τῶν ἐπὶ τὰ κοινὰ τασσομέν[ω]ν ἐξ αὐτῶν Λινδίων καθ’ ἃ καὶ ἐν τοῖς νόμοις γέγραπται κα[ὶ μ]ὴ ̣ μετέχωντι τῶν ἐν Λίνδωι ἱερῶν οἳ μὴ καὶ πρότερον μετεῖχον, δεδόχθαι τοῖς μαστροῖς καὶ Λινδίοις· ἐπαινέσαι αὐτοὺς ὅτι ἄνδρες ἀγαθοὶ ἐγένοντο περὶ τὰ ἱερὰ τὰ Λινδίων, καὶ ἀναγράψαι τόδε τὸ ψάφισμα ἐς στάλαν λιθίναν καὶ θέμειν ἐς τὸ ἱερὸν τᾶς Ἀθάνα[ς], ὅπως πᾶσιν τοῖς ἐπιγινομένοις φανερὸν ἦι, ὅτι Λίνδιοι τῶν ἀγαθῶν ἀνδρῶν μνάμαν ποιεῦνται ἐς τὸν ἅπαντα χρόνον· τὸ δὲ ἀνάλωμα τὸ ἐς τὰν στάλαν καὶ τὰν ἀναγραφὰν ὁ ἱερεὺς [τᾶς] Ἀθάνας τελεσάτω·

40

45

Since the men named above have acted nobly, and have jointly ensured that the appointments at Lindos of priests and sacrificers and hieropoioi and the other public officials are made from among the Lindians as is prescribed in the laws, and that the priesthoods at Lindos are not shared with those who did not hold them previously, it is resolved by the mastroi and the Lindians, to praise them because they have acted nobly concerning the sacred matters of the Lindians, and to inscribe this decree on a stone stēlē and to place it in the temple of Athene, so that it may be clear to all posterity that the Lindians create everlasting memorials of good men. The priest of Athene shall pay the cost of the stēlē and the inscription; and the superintendents who are currently in office shall take care that the stēlē is set up in the temple of Athene.54

The inscription attests to a very jealous protection of the distinction of holding the priesthood of Athena Lindia.55 And, as a source of social

52 53 54 55

See, for example, Boulogne 1994 (Plutarch) and Oliver 1953 (Aelius Aristides). SIG 340 (IG XII 1 761). See Dignas 2003: 45, Kató 2013: 282 and Zachhuber’s contribution in this volume, Chapter 9. For the transformation of the priesthood of Athena Lindia around 40 BCE, when the names of priestesses began to appear beside the names of men, often their husbands, see Ackermann 2013: 24.

The Lindian Chronicle and Local Identity

capital, that honour was publicly celebrated. Oliver Pilz has recently noted, ‘It was apparently customary for the priests of Athena, after their term of service, to dedicate their portraits in the sanctuary.’56 Furthermore, priests at Lindos were proud to advertise their status even after they had completed their periods of service. Various Lindian inscriptions refer to colleges of former priests (hierateukotes).57 The contrast with Athenian practice is telling. Ideally the Panathenaia is open to all Athenians, whether from the asty or the chōra, from Kollytos within the walls or Acharnai well beyond, thus imprinting the festival with an egalitarian ethos suitable to a democratic city. Access to the upper echelons of the Athena Lindia cult, by contrast, is manifestly restricted. Not only are non-Rhodians assiduously excluded, even Rhodians from outside Lindos are ineligible.58 We are reminded that ‘Rhodian’ is a contingent label: facing outwards it included everyone on the island, but looking inwards not every Rhodian had equal access to all major cults. The local remained a tenacious source of status. This is especially significant when set against the tendency to see in Rhodes an almost unchallenged story of cooperation and successful power sharing.59

The Association Habit Furthermore, in trying to identify the geopolitical circumstances that shaped Rhodian institutions, although Rome was an unavoidable presence in the first century BCE, in recent discussion of Rhodian inscriptions Erhard Grzybek reminds us that Rhodes was situated within a complex web of economic and cultic connections tied to places as far away as Samothrace and Egypt. Viewed as a node within a dynamic network, in which ideas, goods, prestige, and power flowed back and forth, Rhodes found itself in various webs. Some were centred on the cities of Rhodes, but others reflected the variety of Rhodian cults and cult organisations. This 56 57

58

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Pilz 2013: 168. Dignas 2003: 43–44; Paul 2013: 262. See I.Lindos 346 (of Dionysos); 350 (of Athena); 378 (of Athena); 419 (of Athena). For further discussion, see Zachhuber in this volume, Chapter 9, who argues convincingly that the terms of IG XII 1 761 address encroachments on local prerogatives by the polis of Rhodes. See Papachristodoulou 1999. It is perhaps also worth noting that the three Rhodian cities assigned very different tasks to hierothytai and heiropoioi and awarded them different statuses. They did not serve the same function in each city, despite having the same names. See Smith 1972.

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should be born in mind since the dominant narrative situating Rhodes in the Hellenistic period remains, as we have seen, some version of unitattribute theory, pitting Rhodes against Rome, but the cults and associations so widespread throughout Rhodian society forcefully attest to a local landscape that looks, for want of a better term, pixelated. There existed on Rhodes dozens of corporate groups serving Rhodian and non-Rhodian communities alike. Their public face, however, was not of trade guilds or ethnic clubs, but cultic associations.60 Take, for example, a recently discovered inscribed statue base from ca. 100 BCE honouring a certain Polykrates and his sons. The two blocks of the statue base carry three inscribed columns, the third of which lists honours awarded to Apollodotos, son of Polykrates, by ‘the Ptolemaic, Kleopatric and Berenikian association (koinon) of Samothraikiastai’. It reads: Ἀπολλόδοτον Πολυκράτευς / καθ᾿ ὑοθεσίαν δὲ Σωσιστράτου / τὸ κοινὸν τὸ Σαμοθραικιαστᾶν Πτολεμαιείων / Κλευπατρείων Βερενικείων τῶν συνμυηθέντων / μετὰ ἄρχοντος Ἀνδρονίκου / ἐτίμασε ἐπαίνωι, χρυσέωι στεφάνωι /εἰκόνι χαλκέαι / ἀρετᾶς ἕνεκα καὶ εὐνοίας καὶ φιλοδοξίας / ἃν ἔχων διατελεῖ εἰς τὸ Σαμοθραικιαστᾶν / Πτολεμαιείων Κλευπατρείων Βερενικείων / τῶν συνμυηθέντων μετὰ ἄρχοντος / Ἀνδρονίκου κοινόν. The Association of the Ptolemaic, Kleopatric and Berenikic Samothraikiastai of those initiated during the archonship of Andronikos honour Apollodotos, son of Polykrates, and by adoption61 son of Sosistratos with praise, a gold crown and a bronze statue, because of his excellence, his goodwill and his love of reputation with which he has behaved towards the Association of the Ptolemaic, Kleopatric and Berenikic Samothraikiastai of those initiated during the archonship of Andronikos.

Like the Poseidoniasts of Beirut, who were on Delos to trade but defined their corporate identity as worshippers of the sea god, the Samothraikiastai labelled themselves in a way that drew attention to their cult affiliation, in this case with the Mysteries of Samothrace, an affiliation which brought them within the orbit of Ptolemaic influence. Such koina were ubiquitous among the Rhodians. Some functioned as eranos-type organisations, lending money to members, while others had a strong connection to the military and especially the Rhodian navy. There is even evidence for one such association describing itself as the koinon of the Atabyriastai slaves of 60

61

Editio princeps: Grzybek 2008; see also SEG 58–817. For discussion of the inscriptions date, see Badoud 2010: 130. Adoption was a common practice in Hellenistic Rhodes. For discussions of its significance, especially in relation to the control of elite privilege, see Rice 1988, Stavrianopoulou 1993 and Gabrielsen 1997: 112–119.

The Lindian Chronicle and Local Identity

the city!62 Vincent Gabrielsen has spoken of foreigners on Rhodes acquiring the ‘association habit’ so prevalent among the Rhodians and his discussion of one in particular is revealing.63 The koinon of the Asklapiastai Nikasioneioi Olympiastai was founded by a certain Nikasion, who fused his name, his wife’s name, Olympias, and the standard version of a group of Asklepios devotees to start up an association that owned property, held games and awarded honours to benefactors. It was a microcosm of Rhodes, down to its internal organisation into three tribes, named modestly: Nikasioneis, Olympieis and Basileis. And as for the Samothraikiastai whom Grzybek studies, he notes that there are seven or eight other such Samothraikiastai koina attested on Rhodes, who played various roles in Rhodian life: one koinon of Samothraikiastai and Lemnesiastai modified their name with τοὶ συνστρατευσάμενοι (fellow soldiers) while two of them were called Σαμοθραικιασταὶ μεσόνεοι (literally ‘midshipmen’ but in fact rowers). This is the context in which the Lindian Chronicle was created, not in an attempt to fashion a single Rhodian identity in the face of Roman power, so much as an attempt to carve out a place for Lindos among the crowded, competing corporate entities – soldiers, sailors, merchants, cult devotees, priests, even slaves – that intersected and overlapped across Rhodian society. This is not to deny changes in the geopolitics of the eastern Mediterranean in the second half of the second century BCE. Behind the Lindian Chronicle’s Borges-like catalogue of things-that-never-were, there lies a very real set of conditions in contemporary Rhodes. Since the midsecond century Rhodes’ fortunes in the wider eastern Mediterranean had certainly declined from the beginning of that century. The failure of negotiations with Rome during the Third Macedonian War and the subsequent punishment of Rhodes after Pydna are undeniable, but societies are equipped to deal with a change in fortunes in different ways, and one response to the geopolitical shifts of the second century was a renascence of nationalism, favoured by the federation of Rhodes and expressed through such institutions as the cult of Halios, the navy and embassies to Rome. But this was complemented by a rejuvenated localism with a focus on the past. The past is a place where claims of status, authority, and importance can be

62

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IG XII 1 31 records a dogma τοῦ κοινοῦ [τῶν Διοσαταβυρι]-αστᾶν τῶν τᾶς πόλ[ι]ος δούλων! The topic of associations, usually defined as corporate groups below the level of the polis, has become a rich field of recent research. See Ismard 2010; Kloppenborg and Ascough 2011; Fröhlich and Hamon 2013; Marchand 2015. On Rhodian associations, see Pugliese Carratelli 1939–40 and Gabrielsen 1997: 123–29. For ‘the association habit’ and Nikasion’s koinon, see Gabrielsen 1997: 128.

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asserted with vigour, and in a society where every institution is in one sense religious, it is to be expected that religious institutions would be the focal point for making claims about the past. Religion does more than make claims about the past. It also requires configuration at the level of action and organisation. The way the Rhodians practised cult entailed a very high level of participation by very high numbers of actors as priests. Here Rhodes presents a very different appearance to Athens, where religious performances were complemented by civic actions as assemblyman, juror or bouleutēs and by the military roles of hoplite, rower or cavalryman. On Rhodes it appears that it was religious institutions which gave fullest expression to the corporate impulse that shaped social life on Rhodes. Large numbers of people rotated through priestly colleges and essentially repeated similar cult activities. Accordingly, it is likely that one cathected to one’s community on Rhodes more powerfully through participation in cultic priesthoods than in any other way. Status, prestige and authority are located here, as is illustrated by a remarkable inscription from Halaesa in Sicily, published by Laurent Dubois.64 The inscription records the decision of a priestly koinon by a vote of 825 priests, an example of corporate priestly decision-making that the editor explicitly links to the Rhodian roots of the group involved, based on the Rhodian dialect of the inscription. Beyond this, the inscription has defied attempts to explain the institution in operation, but the language of the inscription is unambiguous. If it is the case that everyone who is serving or has served in a priesthood in the region is a member of this koinon, then perhaps we can explain the high number, but the point still remains that it is not just cultic participation but priestly performance that seems to be a hallmark of a community strongly identified with Rhodes.

What Really Matters The central place of priesthoods on Rhodes, both in the town of Rhodes but also in the sanctuaries of the three older cities, helps to explain how the Lindian Chronicle served such a key role in defining the identity of Lindos in the late Hellenistic period. With its emphasis on antiquity the Lindian Chronicle is the loudest proclamation of the cri de coeur that Lindos mattered. This was a claim maintained tenaciously by the Lindians, as 64

Dubois 2013.

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Juliane Zachhuber demonstrates in her contribution to this volume (Chapter 9): there was a real tension between being Lindian and being Rhodian. The Chronicle of Lindos can be seen as the most tangible product of this tension, although there may be another dimension to consider. Danielle Kellogg has recently noted that in Classical Athens there appears to be a significant discrepancy between the power group located in the city centre and the local elites whose political influence was expressed at the level of the deme.65 Applying such an interpretation to Rhodes, one might ask whether the priests of Kameiros or Lindos or Ialysos were really integrated into the elite of Rhodes town, or did they prefer to operate at the local level, content to exert influence on a more modest scale? Finally, if we chose to see the Chronicle of Lindos as an assertion of local, as opposed to Rhodian, identity, we should note the emphasis on Lindos as the setting for the epiphanies of the goddess with which the inscription closes. The epiphanies root the Chronicle emphatically in a specific place, the Acropolis of Lindos, a striking location where Athena made her periodic and timely appearances. In the first epiphany, for example, it is the settling of a storm cloud over the acropolis that signals the coming of a great deluge which will alleviate the water shortage of the locals and prove to Datis that the goddess is on the side of the besieged.66 In the second epiphany the miasma of suicide is washed away by the steady rain that pours into the temple once the roof has been opened at the behest of the goddess. In the third, Athena appears to Kallikles who is described as a former priest of Athena Lindia, yet still living in Lindos (ἔτι / διατρίβω[ν] ἐν Λίνδωι). Epiphanies are well and widely attested in the Greek world, but the appearance of the divinity usually serves as a means of confirming the favoured status of the person to whom the god appears.67 In the wellknown case of Syriskos of Chersonesos, the inscription honouring him recognises him for proclaiming the epiphany of the Parthenos, but the actual inscription offers no details of the epiphany and is not topographically specific.68 At Lindos, by contrast, each appearance of Athena emphatically ties the goddess to this one location, and uses the same citation

65 66

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Kellogg 2018. Lee Smith, Rich and Morgan 1966: 182 remark that at the time of their visit (in the mid-1960s) the town possessed one water tap to serve a population of 1,000. For a discussion of epiphanies and the Syriskos inscription in relation to the Lindos Chronicle see Bresson 2006: 533–35. IosPE I2 344.

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practices as in the inventory section to underscore the veracity of the account. Like the iammata from Epidauros, the Chronicle of Lindos connects the comprehensive power of the divine with a specific location, or, as the Chronicle describes it, ‘the most ancient and venerable hieron in existence’.

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  Parker, R. (2009) ‘Subjection, Synoecism and Religious Life’, in P. Funke and N. Luraghi (eds.) The Politics of Ethnicity and the Crisis of the Peloponnesian League. Cambridge, Mass., 183–214. Paul, S. (2013) ‘Roles of Civic Priests in Hellenistic Cos’, in M. Horster and A. Klöckner (eds.) Cities and Priests: Cult Personnel in Asia Minor and the Aegean Islands from the Hellenistic to the Imperial Period. Boston, Mass. and Berlin, 247–78. Pilz, O. (2013) ‘The Profits of Self-Representation: Statues of Female Cult Personnel in the Late Classical and Hellenistic Periods’, in M. Horster and A. Klöckner (eds.) Cities and Priests: Cult Personnel in Asia Minor and the Aegean Islands from the Hellenistic to the Imperial Period. Boston, Mass. and Berlin, 155–76. Pugliese Carratelli, G. (1939–40) ‘Per la Storia delle assocazioni di Rodi antica’, Annuario 1–2, 145–200. (1951) ‘La formazione dello stato Rodio’, Studi Classici e Orientali 1, 77–78. (1953) ‘Sui damoi e le phylai d Rodi’, Studi Classici e Orientali 2, 69–78. (1957) ‘Ancora sui “damoi” di Rodi’, Studi Classici e Orientali 6, 62–75. Rauh, N. (1999) ‘Rhodes, Rome, and the Eastern Mediterranean Wine Trade, 166–88 B.C.’, in V. Gabrielsen et al. (eds) Hellenistic Rhodes: Politics, Culture, and Society. Aarhus, 162–86. Reger, G. (1999) ‘The Relations between Rhodes and Caria from 246 to 167 B.C.’, in V. Gabrielsen et al. (eds) Hellenistic Rhodes: Politics, Culture, and Society. Aarhus, 76–97. Rendina, S. (2014) ‘Riflessioni sull’imperialismo romano: Rodi, Roma e la Croaca di Lindo’, Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. Classe di Lettere e Filosofia 5, 6(1), 363–97. Rice, E. E. (1988) ‘Adoption in Rhodian Society’, in S. Dietz and I. C. Papachristodoulou (eds.) Archaeology in the Dodecanese. Copenhagen, 138–44. Salati, O. (2014) ‘Temi e caratteri della storiografia locale rodia d’età ellenistica’, Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. Classe di Lettere e Filosofia 5, 6(1), 205–37. Santini, M. (2016) ‘A Multi-Ethnic City Shapes Its Past. The “Pride of Halikarnassos” and the Memory of Salmakis’, Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. Classe di Lettere e Filosofia 5, 8(1), 3–35. (2017) ‘Bellerophontes, Pegasos and the Foundation of Halikarnassos. Contributions to the Study of the Salmakis Inscription’, Studi Classici e Orientali 63, 109–44. Sauer, N. (2018) ‘Transport Amphoras as Interlinks in the Ancient World’, Skyllis 18, 33–41. Schmitt, H. (1957) Rom und Rhodos. Munich. Shaya, J. (2005) ‘The Greek Temple as Museum: The Case of the Legendary Treasure of Athena from Lindos’, American Journal of Archaeology 109, 423–42.

The Lindian Chronicle and Local Identity (2015a) ‘Ancient Analogs of Museums’, in E. A. Friedland, M. G. Sobocinski and E. G. Gazda (eds.) The Oxford Book of Roman Sculpture. Oxford and New York, N.Y., 622–37. (2015b) ‘Greek Temple Treasures and the Invention of Collecting’, in M. W. Gahtan and D. Pegazzano (eds.) Museum Archetypes and Collecting in the Ancient World. Leiden, 24–32. Simonton, M. (2015) ‘The Cry from the Herald’s Stone: The Revolutionary Logic behind the Rhodian Democratic Uprising of 395 B.C.E.’, Transactions of the American Philological Association 145, 281–324. Smith, D. R. (1972) ‘Hieropoioi and Hierothytai on Rhodes’, L’Antiquité Classique 41(2), 532–39. Stavrianopoulou, E. (1993) ‘Die Frauenadoption auf Rhodos’, Tyche 8, 177–88. Thomas, R. (2014) ‘The Greek Polis and the Tradition of Polis History: Local History, Chronicles and the Patterning of the Past’, in A. Moreno and R. Thomas (eds.) Patterns of the Past. Epitedeumata in the Greek Tradition. Oxford, 145–72. Thomsen, C. A. (2017) ‘The Thirteenth Tribe of Lindos’, in M. Nowak, A. Lajtar and J. Urbanik (eds.) Tell Me Who You Are: Labelling Status in the GraecoRoman World. Warsaw, 283–307. Westlake, H. D. (1983a) ‘Conon and Rhodes: The Troubled Aftermath of Synoecism’, Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 24, 333–44. (1983b) ‘Rival Traditions on a Rhodian Stasis’, Museum Helveticum 40, 239–50. Wiemer, H.-U. (2001) Rhodische Traditionen in der hellenistischen Historiographie. Frankfurt. (2002) Krieg, Handel und Piraterie: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des hellenistischen Rhodos. Berlin. (2011) ‘Early Hellenistic Rhodes: The Struggle for Independence and the Dream of Hegemony’, in A. Erskine and L. Llewellyn-Jones (eds.) Creating a Hellenistic World. Swansea, 123–46.

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Shifting Identities and Defensive Localism: Conflicts of Religious Narratives in Post-Synoikism Rhodes  

The Greek city of Rhodes and the religious efforts of the Lindians to reassert their local identity after the synoikism of 408 BCE that featured in the previous chapter are also the subject of Juliane Zachhuber’s investigation. Her study advances the argument by situating the key source for the study of localism on Rhodes, the Lindos Chronicle, within the wider context of the often-turbulent history of the island. By drawing on comparative material, including a decree from Kameiros, one of the other two older cities that were incorporated in the new Rhodian polis, Zachhuber highlights just how extraordinary the efforts of the Lindians to reassert their local identity was. Zachhuber’s chapter reminds us that all identities, local and otherwise, operate in two dimensions: by establishing internal coherence and emphasising outside difference. She elaborates in particular on the latter dimension. In the tension between Lindian and Rhodian identities, the category of the local emerges once again as contested and in flux. The defensive localism mentioned in the title thus refers to the efforts of the Lindians to safeguard their distinctive cults after the foundation of the new federal city.

Introduction The ‘local’ in Greek religion may be sought in many different places. It is often considered in opposition to religion that is not local – religion that happened at a regional level, and particularly a more universal Greek religion, represented by the realm of Homeric and other Greek myths,

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My thanks go to the editors, Jeremy McInerney, and other members of the Local Horizons in Greek Religion, who gave me invaluable feedback and inspiration. The idea for this paper, and my interpretation of the key inscription IG XII 1, 761, stemmed from a discussion in my DPhil viva with my examiners Peter Thonemann and Riet van Bremen, to whose insight and suggestions I am very much indebted.

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and of the great sanctuaries at Delphi and Olympia. More recently this opposition, traditionally casting the ‘local’ as the ‘polis’ and its religion against this ‘Panhellenic’ dimension, has rightly been challenged in various quarters and for several reasons.1 While the polis was clearly one level at which ‘local’ religion was experienced and practised, and certainly played a major role in the organisation of festivals and priesthoods, this understanding of the ‘local’ occludes other groups and identities that existed, not just non-civic worshipping communities and personal religion, but also religious identities that did not conform neatly to polis divisions. Nonetheless, these political and civic divisions still offer a useful framework, especially insofar as they could provide boundaries against which people might define themselves, powerful identity markers that could serve as a model or paradigm for other groups’ representations. That religion played a significant role in social cohesion and in the expression of communities’ identities has long been recognised by scholars. Yet, as Kostas Vlassopoulos aptly notes, this should not be considered to result in monolithic constructs. Rather, religion could equally provide an arena for communities to contest ‘conflicting visions of relationships among humans, and between humans and gods’.2 One way of establishing these relationships is to look for narratives that were articulated concerning particular cults or religious matters, and how these constructed or shaped communities.3 ‘Conflicting visions’, and the way that religious disputes shaped communal identities, lie at the heart of this paper. I take as my starting point a moment of particular tension within a polis concerning the locality of, and access to, ‘the sacred’ – τὰ ἱερά. Through careful contextualisation, I will explore the construction of religious identities of communities in the local discourse of one particular state in the late Classical and Hellenistic period: the island of Rhodes. The fact that Rhodes appears twice in a volume on local religion speaks to its value as a case-study for detecting different sub-polis levels at which religious activity occurred. During the Hellenistic period, the city was a major centre of the so-called associative phenomenon, with numerous theophoric koina attesting through their deity-derived names to cultic activities and interests, which connected diverse people (citizens and foreigners, men and women, free and slave) into a multiplicity of non-civic

1

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See especially Kindt 2012: 25–27, 130–54. For a critical reassessment of ‘panhellenism’, see Scott 2010: 256–73. 3 Vlassopoulos 2015: 264. See Eidinow 2011: esp. 31–35 for this approach.

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networks.4 While these convey a key dimension of local religion, they are not my focus. Rather, I will examine the construction of religious identity by the community calling itself the Lindians in the period following the Rhodian synoikismos, or unification, and how their religious narratives confronted and engaged with the local discourse of Rhodes.

‘All for One and One for All’: The Rhodian Synoikism and its Aftermath Let us begin with the triumphant self-assertion of a Rhodian community, and the tensions this reveals within the local religious discourse: in the late fourth century BCE, we find the Lindians of Rhodes honouring a group of men who, having successfully contended in a lawsuit, safeguarded for the Lindians that the elections of the priests, hierothytai, hieropoioi and others carrying out the affairs of the community take place in Lindos and are done from the Lindians themselves, as prescribed by the laws, and that no-one participate in the hiera in Lindos who did not participate before.5

Evidently, we have here a response at the local level against attempted changes to the access to and control over sacred matters; the culprit, as we shall see given the political context, must be the polis of Rhodes. From where did this crisis stem? Who are the people who felt the need to protect their hiera from the overbearing state? What inspired and provoked this defensive stance? And what does it tell us about the local dimensions of Rhodian religion in the early Hellenistic period? To understand the social, political, and religious context of this inscription, we need to take a step back and consider the fourth century BCE, and its tumultuous and transformative effects on the Rhodians and their identity. In 408/407 BCE, having revolted from the Athenian arche, the three cities on the island of Rhodes – Ialysos, Kameiros, and Lindos – came together, with Spartan support, in a synoikism, forming a new polis, that of ‘Rhodos’, and founding, as part of this process, a new city, also called

4

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A religious dimension to these groups seems likely, given their naming practices: Maillot 2012 and 2015. Gabrielsen 2001 discusses their economic activity and significance. Jeremy McInerney in this volume, Chapter 8, demonstrates how this crowded scene of competing entities contributed to the particular flavour of late Hellenistic Lindian local identity. See Appendix, ll. 38–42.

Shifting Identities and Defensive Localism

‘Rhodos’, at the northernmost tip of the island.6 As part of the political unification, the citizenship body was reorganised, broadly along territorial lines. Much as in Athens, citizens belonged to a deme, which, in turn, belonged to one of three tribes, or phylai – confusingly, but also tellingly, these tribes were named after the three original poleis.7 Each of these had its own board of local councillors, so-called mastroi, who, alongside the members of the tribe, passed decrees. Unlike at Athens, we find little evidence for activity – whether civic or religious – at the deme level, and instead far more at tribe level. We are thus relatively well-informed on priesthoods and cults located at Lindos and Kameiros; while some evidence also survives for Ialysos, it is much more limited, and so will not form a part of this discussion.8 The associated rites and festivals were held and organised primarily by members of the tribal subdivision in question. In this way, we find, for instance, separate priests of Athena Lindia at Lindos, and of Athena Polias at Ialysos and Kameiros; while there are some shared characteristics of these ‘Rhodian Athenas’ – a ‘poliad’ role located on each of the three acropoleis, with some similarities in votive deposits – these were separate cult sites, with largely different worshipping communities.9 The synoikism, then, did not spell the end of regional life, but its impact on Rhodian identity cannot be underestimated. Nathan Badoud’s recent work on the time-systems of the Rhodian state confirms the structural as well as cognitive shifts that took place in 408 BCE, with the creation of a new calendar accompanying the establishment of a common council and assembly, while the selection of the first priest of Helios, the new state’s eponym, followed in 407 BCE.10 The effects of political events, like this synoikism, on Greek religion can fruitfully be studied within the paradigm of polis religion.11 Following this model, one would expect to see religious structures, cults, and rituals bearing strong marks of a new central identity after 408 BCE, if a religious unification was embedded within the political one. In some ways, such a central Rhodian religious organisation is clearly visible. On a cultic level, the new polis of Rhodes was represented primarily 6

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Diod. Sic. 13.75.1; cf. Gabrielsen 2000. The homonymy of polis and capital city is of course significant: it demonstrates the relationship between the longstanding island identity and the new political entity, focused demonstrably on the new city foundation. In fact, there was a further tribal subdivision, at this phylē-level, which grouped each tribe’s demes into three parts. On Rhodian political subdivisions see Pugliese Carratelli 1951: 87–88; Jones 1987: 245–50; Papachristodoulou 1999. Much less Ialysian material from the Hellenistic period has been excavated; it is likely that this is in part due to its physical proximity to the new city of Rhodes-town, which probably grew to eclipse much of the old settlement. 10 11 Kowalzig 2007: 237–38. Badoud 2015: 23 and passim. Parker 2009.

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by one deity: Helios. The fact that this god had not received significant, if any, cultic worship before the synoikism, and yet that Pindar could sing of him in 464 BCE as the island’s founder, demonstrates his role as a panRhodian symbol, and thus the ideal recipient for the kind of pan-Rhodian cult for which Athena, with her multiple competing sanctuaries, was less suited.12 Helios truly embodied the new Rhodian state: his priests named the Rhodian year, and were selected annually from members of one of the three tribes in strict rotation, reflecting the tripartite nature of Rhodes. Their names were stamped onto amphoras and dispersed far and wide across the Mediterranean.13 Helios’ radiate image marked the coins of the Rhodian polis, and the deity was the subject of famous and monumental artwork, being represented in his quadriga in a statue by Lysippus, as well as in the more famous immense bronze statue, the ‘Colossus’.14 The latter was a monument to Rhodes’ hour of victorious survival, following the abandonment of Demetrios Poliorketes’ siege in 304 BCE. The identification of Rhodes with the Sun continued for centuries, forming a common epithet of the island in literature, such as ps.-Lucian’s Amores in which it is described as ἡλιάς, ‘of the sun’, and ἡ πόλις Ἡλίου, ‘the city of the Sun[/Helios]’ in Lycinus’ travel narrative, or the proclamation by the firstcentury CE poet Apollonides that the ‘Most blessed of islands, then, is Rhodes, on which such a sun shines’.15 Well suited to metaphors about Rhodian prosperity (and its climate – tourism websites commonly boast of the island’s 300 days of sunshine per year), this association also relates to Rhodian religious identity; the sun that shines on Rhodes is Helios, and the fact that this close relationship and image was propagated far and wide in the Hellenistic period (and beyond) must reflect how Rhodians were expressing their religion to the outside world, as well as others’ perceptions of this cult’s significance. One case in point comes from Xenophon of Ephesos’ Story of Anthia and Habrocomes, in which the heroes’ stopovers on Rhodes are strongly imbued with acts and places of worship of Helios – dedications in his sanctuary, sacrifices, prayers, and a festival.16

12 14

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13 Pind. Ol. 7; Kowalzig 2007: 247–63; Paul 2015. Finkielsztejn 2001. Coins: Ashton 2001; Lysippus’ quadriga: Plin. HN 34.60, cf. Cass. Dio 47.33 – apparently too heavy for Cassius to remove during his sack; Colossus: Plin. HN 34.18, Strabo 14.2.5; cf. Badoud 2012. On images of Helios more generally: Matern 2002. [Luc.] Am. 7–8; Apollonides: Greek Anthology 16.49: μακαρτάτη ἔστ᾽ ἄρα νήσων καὶ Ῥόδος, ἣ τοίῳ λάμπεται ἠελίῳ. Xen. Ephes. 1.12.2; 5.11–13.

Shifting Identities and Defensive Localism

If rooted in real religious practice and mentality, this picture seems to express the position of the Rhodian state in the aftermath of the siege by Demetrios in 304 BCE; its prosperity well-established, and its success in promoting itself in this new world encapsulated by the generous response of kings, dynasts, and cities to the destructive earthquake of the late third century.17 The situation in the fourth century was likely very different, a century during which the newly synoikised state was riven with stasis, was confronted by the territorial ambitions of the Hekatomnids, and was later garrisoned by Alexander the Great’s Macedonian troops.18 The new city’s foundation likely began in the late fifth century. It was a gradual process, and it would have taken several decades of building work before sanctuaries were established and Rhodians (and others) moved to this new urban centre. The archaeology is difficult, but the inscription of the catalogue of priests of Helios in 382/381 BCE suggests that this cult at least had a physical site at this stage.19 By the time of the great flood of 316 BCE, described by Diodorus, the city had temples of Dionysos and Asklepios, an agora, and extensive residential quarters, which were ravaged by the catastrophe.20 Just over a decade later, during the wars of the Diadochi, the new city was the focus of relations with Ptolemy, the place where state decisions were made, and the site of the majority of the fighting during Demetrios’ siege.21 Following the siege’s abandonment, the city’s fortifications and docks were improved, buildings were renovated or created, including a divine precinct devoted to the worship of Ptolemy, and victory monuments were erected. The ramifications of Rhodian success in courting the Diadochi, and their survival in the face of Antigonid forces in 304 BCE, were significant. Some of these knock-on effects took place almost immediately, most crucially, the incorporation of the territories of the Karian Chersonesos, the so-called Rhodian peraia, as well as the nearby islands of Chalke, Syme and, to the south-west, Karpathos.22 The inhabitants of these regions were divided into demes, which were assigned to the three Rhodian phylai, and thus became 17 18

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Polyb. 5.88–90. On Rhodian stasis: Funke 1980; Westlake 1984; on Mausolus: Hornblower 1982: 104–05, 124–30; Macedonian garrison: Arr. Anab. 2.20.2; driven out: Diod. Sic. 18.8.1. For a general narrative of Rhodes in the fourth century: Berthold 1984: 19–37. As noted above, the first priest of Helios was selected in 407 BCE, and this is when the catalogue begins; however, the first 28 lines (heading and 27 names) were evidently inscribed by the same hand, with equal spacing between lines and letters; in the following lines, a number of differences can be recognised in sizing and letter-forms, suggesting that after this point, the catalogue was continued on an annual basis. See Morricone 1952: 356–57; TRI 1 with comm. 21 22 Diod. Sic. 19.45. Diod. Sic. 20.81–88. Badoud 2011.

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full citizens.23 This development increased the Rhodian state’s territory not just in terms of land but also in terms of control over key maritime passages. It has rightly been interpreted as a sign of the island’s success as a micro-imperial power, allowing it to contend as a major player in the Aegean during the third century.24 While this was undoubtedly the case, especially insofar as control over the naval corridor between the island and the Karian Chersonesos enabled the building up of their fleet, the effects on Rhodians of a significant expansion of their citizen body have not gained much attention.25 Aside from legal and administrative changes, a citizenship grant of such dimensions would have resulted in substantial shifts in what it meant to be a Rhodian, and how this identity found expression in religious contexts.

Lindian First, Rhodian Second? It is within this context that the Lindian decree, cited in part at the start of this paper, belongs. The historical background sketched above can elucidate the discourse that surrounded local religious identity in the late fourth century – a century that had seen no end of cognitive shifts in what it meant to be a Rhodian. The full text of the document in question, with my translation, is given in the Appendix below. The inscription begins with the standard decree formula for this sublevel of the polis (ἔδοξε μαστροῖς καὶ Λινδίοις), then goes on to introduce, first, three epistatai, selected by the Lindians, then a further thirty individuals who joined in a lawsuit. All these men are then listed, by name, patronymic, and demotic. Next we are informed why they are being honoured – namely, their successful efforts to safeguard the Lindian hiera – and are given details about the physical inscription and setting up of this decree, intending, it is explicitly stated, that the memory of these men and their achievements will endure for all time. 23 24

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Boyxen 2018: 43–44. While it could never contend with Hellenistic kings in terms of military strength, it held substantial diplomatic and ideological clout, largely due to its important role within trading routes, as can be seen in the gifts showered on it (see above), and in the praise heaped on it, e.g. in Strabo 14.2.5. See also the Rhodians’ own claims (if authentic) of sovereignty ‘both on land and sea’ (ἐν πόντῳ κἠν χθονὶ κοιρανία), supposedly inscribed on the base of the Colossus: Greek Anthology 6.171, from Meleager’s Stephanus; cf. Wiemer 2011. Note the archaeological evidence for ship sheds at Loryma on the Karian Chersonesos: Held 2009; Blackman 2010.

Shifting Identities and Defensive Localism

The basic thrust of this text and the events it describes seems clear enough: the Lindians are objecting to an attempt made to open up their hiera and religious offices to those who did not have access to them before, as prescribed in their nomoi. It looks strongly like a ‘centralising’ religious policy by the Rhodian polis being rejected, successfully, at the local level. As stated above, the historical context for this action by the Lindians and the consequent inscription of this text is now largely accepted by scholars, following Badoud’s dating of it to 304 BCE or shortly thereafter, to be the aftermath of the incorporation of the peraia and nearby islands, which means that the people being excluded by this motion were most likely those who had recently joined the ranks of citizenship, in the new Lindian demes located in the Karian Chersonesos and on the island of Karpathos.26 This interpretation is further endorsed by the fact that, judging by our epigraphic evidence, these citizens from peraian demes are indeed absent from Lindian priest lists and dedications.27 As generations of scholars have been keen to emphasise, the Lindians attached a great deal of significance and social prestige to their traditional priesthoods, in particular that of Athena Lindia; already in the early twentieth century, Christian Blinkenberg traced stemmata of prominent Lindian families through the priestly epigraphy. Picking up on these observations, Vincent Gabrielsen considered priesthoods to be one of the major repositories of local power controlled by the aristocracy in Rhodes, drawing primarily on Lindian examples.28 Their apparent desire to safeguard these offices from ‘not-true-Lindians’, and this inscription, are often cited in this context. While elements of this interpretation are undoubtedly correct, it also reveals fundamental misconceptions of locality and sub-regions in Hellenistic Rhodes. My re-evaluation will examine more precisely what dimensions the ‘local’ possesses in this text, and how this illuminates the religious discourse in Rhodes. First, let us consider the different local dimensions at play here. As I explained above, politically these ‘Lindians’ were Rhodian citizens, belonging to one of the demes allocated to the tribe of Lindos. Since territorially there was likely much overlap between this region and that of the pre-synoikism polis of Lindos, there are obvious grounds for

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Badoud 2011; see Bresson 1988: 145 and Dignas 2003: 45–46 for earlier, similar interpretations. Boyxen 2018: 184–86; we should note, however, that the general lack of demotics in Rhodian epigraphy makes it difficult to prove this point conclusively. Blinkenberg 1941: 29–50; see now also Badoud 2015: 287–304. Priesthoods as a key local power structure: Gabrielsen 1997: 130–36.

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association between the phylē of Lindos and the earlier polis – in addition, of course, to the use of the same name. But it is important to stress that these were not the same political entities, and did not have the same identities. Even if most Lindian demesmen in the late fourth century could point to their descent from inhabitants and citizens of the prior polis of Lindos, their experience and identity was markedly different from that of their great-great-grandparents. Many now lived in the asty, with no division by deme or tribe on a daily basis, engaging in Rhodian religious and civic life in the capital city, in a variety of contexts. One reason that this point is worth clarifying in the context of this Lindian decree is that when we read this in terms of an imposition by the polis of Rhodes on Lindian hiera, or of the Lindians’ rejection of this, it becomes easy to forget that these are not altogether separate bodies: the Lindians who defended their hiera against the state were also themselves citizens of that same state, and would have sat in the ekklēsia when such matters were debated and voted on. This tells us something about the contexts in which tribal identity could be called on to matter in the polis assembly. In addition, the political division of ‘Lindians’ at this stage included the citizens who belonged to the new demes on Karpathos and on the Karian mainland. A related point to reiterate is that of nomenclature. Although these ‘Lindians’ are politically not the same Lindians as those who existed in the old polis of Lindos before the synoikism, they tellingly chose to construct their identity in these terms and focus it to a significant degree on sacred matters – hiera. This second point is worth dwelling on: why were these hiera so significant for these Lindians, and how can this inscription help us understand the construction of religious identity in early Hellenistic Lindos? A brief outline of some characteristics of Rhodian religion and the image of prosperity propagated in this period was already sketched above. Clearly our decree opens up a completely different level of discourse; what can this tell us about Rhodian conceptions of locality and regionality, and their place in the religious sphere? Let us return to the text, and the stēlē on which it is inscribed – a monument for posterity as it depicts itself (with some foresight). Visually, the main focus lies on the list of individuals who are being honoured; since the stēlē is relatively small – approximately 96 cm high – the top names would have been at stomach or chest-level, depending on the height of the base, and the position of display. The names, unusually for Rhodian inscriptions, are marked not just with patronymics but also with demotics – corresponding to eleven of the twelve Lindian demes located on the island

Shifting Identities and Defensive Localism

of Rhodes.29 The organising principle of this list is unclear – neither alphabetical nor by deme; the number (thirty) perhaps suggests that a team of ten supported each of the three epistatai, although the mix of demes speaks to its unofficial and voluntary nature. Nonetheless, the specification of the men’s demotics, in addition to the common identification by their fathers, points to a particular interest in stressing Lindian identity in both a political and a territorial sense: belonging to these demes is envisaged as legitimising this motion that is being fought for the restriction of access to the hiera to the Lindians – the Lindians located on the island of Rhodes that is, not the political Lindians who, by this point, included those living in the peraia. Already we can see that the religious community being expressed or constructed through this action, while clearly engaging with the political context, does not map onto the divisions of the polis in a straightforward way, yet showcases a strong interest in local place and territory. The makeup and nature of this community can be further characterised by considering the people involved, by asking who had such an interest in fighting a decision presumably passed in the polis’ main assembly. Some overlap exists between this list of names and those found in an almost contemporaneous subscription from the Lindian Acropolis, recording funds collected for the restoration of Athena’s kosmos and drinking cups: nine of the thirty volunteers found in our decree also contributed to this epidosis, while one is probably the son of a contributor.30 In addition, two of the men, Astymedon and Philion, brothers, and sons of Androsthenes, had both been priests of Athena Lindia (in 329 and 326 BCE respectively); Theaidetos son of Polycharmos probably went on to hold the priesthood in 294 BCE (only his patronymic survives in the priest list, but the association is likely).31 We might add that two others, Hagesandros, son of Polyaratos, and Deinias, son of Anthagoras, served as priests of the Lindian Poseidon Hippios cult in the late fourth century/ early third century.32 In the third century, when the Sanctuary of Athena Lindia underwent a major renovation, an inscription from around 260 BCE appears to bear witness to the rededication of the new temple; on a marble epistyle we find a dedication by two brothers, Kleandridas and Timotheos, 29 30

31 32

For a table of identified Rhodian demes, listed by tribe, see Badoud 2015: 3. Epidosis: TRI 15, I.Lindos 51. See Badoud 2015: 77. That the overlap between these two lists is, after all, relatively limited might suggest that for many of the Lindians involved in the lawsuit, these hiera were not, at the end of the day, of lasting importance in the coming years. Sons of Androsthenes: TRI 22 ll.9 and 13; Theaidetos son of Polycharmos: TRI 22 l.37. TRI 13 dI l.1, 24; Deinias likely held it in 314 BCE, Hagesandros in 291.

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sons of Aleximachos.33 Given common naming customs, their father Aleximachos was almost certainly the Aleximachos, son of Kleandridas, we find as one of the three epistatai in our inscription – suggesting that a significant connection and obligation to this cult was passed on in this family. This evidence for other involvement in local religious life by a substantial proportion of the volunteers suggests that underlying interest and investment in cultic activity at Lindos played a role in inciting these men (even if the disappearance of others from Lindian epigraphy indicates that this devotion varied). The contributions to physical aspects of Athena Lindia’s cult deserve particular attention here. It has been convincingly proposed that new drinking vessels and ornaments were needed because the old ones were melted down during Demetrios’ siege to mint coinage: silver didrachms, with Helios’ head on the obverse and the Rhodian rose on the reverse, have been dated to this very period.34 Alain Bresson has further argued that a golden Nike statue, recorded in the so-called Lindian Chronicle of 99 BCE as no longer extant in the sanctuary, was also melted down in these years.35 If this truly was the case, it adds another dimension to the restoration of these ritual objects by individual contributors, perhaps another point of tension between the ‘local’ and the polis in the aftermath of the siege, and of the goddess’ own investment in this conflict. Athena’s kosmos presumably refers to jewellery or other ornaments placed on the goddess’ statue, forming an important part of the divinity’s presence and appearance for her worshippers; the cups will have fulfilled a ritual function, in pouring libations or feasting, or possibly in processions for the goddess.36 The melting down and recasting of these objects during a national crisis could on the one hand be seen as a fittingly momentous gesture on behalf of a powerful protective deity; a symbolic transformation

33

34

35

36

I.Lindos 71; see Lippolis 1988–89: 127–29 for the argument that this dedication refers to the temple’s rededication. Badoud dates the inscription to around 260 BCE: Badoud 2015: 227. Badoud 2015: 80–82; on the coinage: Ashton 2001: 93. See Diod. Sic. 20.84 for other extraordinary measures taken by the Rhodians during the siege. Bresson 2006: 545–46; LC C36. On the ‘Lindian Chronicle’ and the often fantastic creations of local memory in late Hellenistic Lindos, see McInerney’s contribution to this volume, Chapter 8. Note e.g. the function of a potērion in a ritual banquet at a familial cult at Thera: CGRN 152 ll. 129–31. More commonly we find a kratēr or kylix used in libation contexts; see e.g. the sacrificial calendar of Kos, CGRN 86 at A.30 and A.50, and the Molpoi regulations from Miletos, CGRN 201 at ll. 8, 11, 13, 16, 39. By contrast, potēria likely indicate smaller vessels, for individual use. That they played a particular role in Athena Lindia’s worship is suggested by the dedications of Minos and Rhesos in the ‘Lindian Chronicle’, both of whom are recorded as leaving a potērion as an offering to the goddess: LC B IV and VII.

Shifting Identities and Defensive Localism

as well as a practical one.37 On the other hand, it is not hard to see how such a deprivation of a local goddess’ cult and sanctuary would have provided a powerful motivator for individuals who identified as part of this Lindian community to contribute, financially, but also in other ways, for instance through holding a local religious office. The layout of the epidosis is also telling in this regard; while no amounts or contributions are specified, the individuals listed appear in columns according to their deme group. The lack of any indication of monetary amounts might suggest that contributions took another form (e.g. actual objects or votives), but in terms of presentation the inscription is again conveying something about the construction of Lindian identity in this period: in a comparable way to the decree discussed above, polis divisions form the schema for this local project, tying these individuals to the sanctuary in political and territorial terms, while simultaneously creating a distinct worshipping community of individuals contributing to this cult. Somewhat strikingly, the epidosis includes a group of Physkioi, individuals from one of the new peraian demes, as well as a small number of men from Kameiran demes. This surely demonstrates the appeal of the Lindian cult of Athena, and the eagerness of the newly minted Lindian citizens from Physkos to contribute underlines how close the association was between being Lindian and worshipping Athena Lindia. The fact that they were allowed to contribute need not surprise us; it is, after all, not uncommon for restrictive regulations to be loosened when financial benefits might be gained – we might think of the opportunities metics in Athens had to hold a chorēgia, when other aspects of civic religion remained off-limits to them, or of the presence of foreigners in public subscriptions.38 The historical and political developments of the first hundred years of the synoikised Rhodian state thus led to the local tensions outlined above, and the need or desire for different communities to assert their identity. While it is possible that these had existed from the start, and that Lindians had never wanted the synoikism, nursed resentment, and pursued exclusions and special treatment throughout, there is in fact little to suggest that this was the case. The great list of annual priests of Athena Lindia was set up in 406 BCE, marking the start of the new era (there were never attempts to retroject this aspect of the cult back in time – unlike, for instance, the

37

38

Note that the ‘Lindian Chronicle’ recounts an epiphanic appearance of Athena Lindia during Demetrios’ siege: LC D ll. 95–115. Wijma 2014: 66–75; Foreigners as contributors in public subscriptions: Migeotte 1992: no. 38, pp. 110–11, no. 40, pp. 118–20, no. 44, pp. 131–32, no. 46, pp. 135–37.

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way that the people of Halikarnassos did with their list of priests of Poseidon), and within the new polis structures there are no differences between Lindos and Kameiros or Ialysos.39 If an entire third of the new state was opposed to these reforms, it is unlikely the synoikism and new city’s foundation would ever have succeeded. A small but pertinent onomastic observation is worth making here: the appearance of the Lindian called Phaethon in both the decree and epidosis considered above; it is tempting to see this name, otherwise unattested in the Greek world, as a reference to the myths of Helios, that most pan-Rhodian of deities. Lindian onomastics are otherwise highly conservative, and so this innovation, made by his parents in the mid-fourth century, might imply a shift in identity, a wish to express a new sense of belonging.40 Yet the events in the late fourth century, the scars of the long siege, followed by the fruits of victory and success being enjoyed by the new capital city, seem to have fostered, if not resentment, then at least a desire among some Lindians to re-affirm their roots. This desire for localism, from an emphasis on locally enshrined nomoi to political and territorial claims, was a direct response to the forces that were creating a new definition of what it meant to be a Rhodian.41 The expansion of citizenship was seen or presented as a threat to their identity, and created an opportunity for a community to define itself within and against the local frameworks that existed.

Lindian Identity and Peraian Pariahs What this local self-definition looked like can be established through a closer inspection of our text. In the past, scholars have focused on the access to religious offices as the primary concern, pointing to the prestige attached to the eponymous priesthood of Athena Lindia in particular, and showing that, in comparison to Kameiros, there is almost no sign in the extensive epigraphic record for Lindian religious personnel of anyone from 39

40

41

We are missing the first part of the list, but numerical annotations make it clear that this was when it began: Badoud 2015: 37–73; TRI 12. This Phaethon also passes his name on to his grandson (see I.Lindos 86 l. 5), but there are no further attestations of it. The fact that this is a reference to a son of Helios from a myth not associated with Rhodes, where the foundation stories focus on his son Kerkaphos, father to Lindos, Kameiros, and Ialysos, is striking, and shows perhaps a greater semantic range of this deity than usually conceived of. See Beck 2020: 6–11 on how expanding networks and globalising movements create a ‘need’ of locality and foster localism.

Shifting Identities and Defensive Localism

a peraian deme.42 If we look in greater detail at what it was that this delegation fought for and achieved, we see that, indeed, the text starts by listing the offices that are to be protected. It specifies priesthoods, hierothytai, and, strangely, hieropoioi – the latter are not otherwise attested in Lindos. They did, however, exist at the polis level, so this might be an indication that this board of religious officials, like other magistracies, relied on the tribal structures – that is, that a third of these polis hieropoioi would belong to the Lindian phylē. In addition to stating that these, and ‘the other’ offices, are to be elected ‘from the Lindians’, the text is emphasising the location of these elections: they are to take place in Lindos – ταὶ αἱρέσιες γίνωνται ἐν Λίνδωι – the syntax stressing this aspect, rather than merely specifying which elections are meant. This suggests two important things: first, that the polis of Rhodes was in the process of physically centralising aspects of religious organisation on the island, presumably in light of the capital city’s growth; and second, that the location of priestly and other elections was considered to be an integral part of Lindian identity in the late fourth century. A much later Lindian inscription informs us that, at least in the first century CE, there was a particular location in Lindian territory known as the deiras, at which such elections took place; we may hypothesise that it was this same space that these late fourth-century Lindians had in mind.43 The second measure the delegation is praised for protecting seems to be an even more fundamental exclusion: that those who did not previously partake of, or share in, the hiera in Lindos continue to be kept from participation: κα[ὶ μ]ὴ ̣ μετέ-/χωντι τῶν ἐν Λίνδωι ἱερῶν οἳ μὴ καὶ πρότερον μετεῖχον. This clause has been largely ignored by scholars commenting on this inscription, or else shrugged off as unrealistic or implausible.44 What does the notoriously ambiguous term τὰ ἱερά mean in this context? Denoting anything sacred, and perhaps most commonly ‘rites’, its combination with μετέχω might also suggest that the more specific meaning of ‘sacrificial offerings’ is intended here; however, given the common usage of thysia in Lindian inscriptions, it would feel more natural to find this if sacrifices were being discussed.45 As Walter Robert Connor explores in the 42

43

44 45

See e.g. Gabrielsen 1997: 30–31, 132–33. For the involvement of peraians in Kameiran civic and religious life, see Rice 1999. TRI 25 ll. 60–61 (I.Lindos 419); cf. Badoud 2015: 43–44, who argues that this term, likely a remnant of early Argive settlers, denoted the plateau to the west of the Lindian settlement. E.g. Boyxen 2018: 184; Krauter 2004: 99. Commonly found in the inscriptions from the so-called Boukopion area; see e.g. I.Lindos 581, 582, 595–97. More significantly we find it used in the lengthy inscription from 22 CE describing

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context of Archaic and Classical Athenian religion and politics, τὰ ἱερά often denote one important part of a polis’ order and its financial control over civic affairs (in Athenian examples commonly paired with τὰ ὅσια).46 This link with civic and even financial administration is perhaps also present in our Lindian text. A final possibility is that τὰ ἱερά here denote sacred places – built and non-built – asserting Lindian ownership over these. While this last interpretation might be stretching the meaning of μετέχω, the specification of the hiera as being those ἐν Λίνδωι, in Lindos, at least shows another emphasis on location – whether it be referring to rites or sacred places. While the complete exclusion of people who were not members of the original Lindian demes from religious sanctuaries or rites at Lindos was clearly not enforced, this is not what the decree stipulates; rather it is a share in these sacred things. Presence at rituals or festivals in sanctuaries was, as in other cities, possible for a wide range of groups.47 However, a full share in these Lindian hiera was restricted to the members of a select group of demes. If this involved particular rituals or sacrificial offerings that took place in Lindian sanctuaries, this would have further cemented the links between this group of Lindians and their connection to the religion of their local territory. As is so common in the establishment of communities, it was precisely the exclusion of others that formed the basis for this Lindian identity, emphasising their privileged position with respect to Lindian cults, and thus strengthening the bonds with each other, and between themselves and their local goddess Athena at Lindos. Despite the novelty of the measures enacted and celebrated in our inscription, the narrative constructed around them is very clearly one of continuity with the Lindos that came before, an appeal to the ties to presynoikism Lindos, a polis in its own right, with its own religious rites and offices, and its traditional nomoi: the worshipping community that is being ‘protected’ in the late fourth century consists of οἳ καὶ πρότερον μετεῖχον, ‘those who previously participated’. As I have shown above, this is an artificial construction; the Lindos of the past no longer existed, and the

46 47

measures taken to alleviate financial difficulties faced by the cult: I.Lindos 419 ll. 6, 55, 78–79. Cf. also the dichotomy between the two terms in Xen. Hell. 2.4.20, when the herald Kleokritos talks of μετεσχήκαμεν δὲ ὑμῖν καὶ ἱερῶν τῶν σεμνοτάτων καὶ θυσιῶν καὶ ἑορτῶν τῶν καλλίστων. Connor 1988. In general see Krauter 2004: 66–67. Note e.g. the inscription concerned with punishing those who set up tents too close to the Lindian fountains, apparently part of the sanctuary of the Nymphs, which lists separate punishments for free men and slaves, suggesting that the presence of both was equally likely: SEG 57.764.

Shifting Identities and Defensive Localism

Lindians now included people who lived in the new capital city of Rhodes, on Karpathos, or on the Karian mainland. Finally, we should remember the detailed publication clause, the instructions to set up this stēlē in the Sanctuary of Athena (Lindia), determining and constituting a visual marker for the perceived physical centre of Lindian hiera, and for the newly defined worshipping community of Lindos. This remarkable document, then, provides both a snapshot of a reaction against a particular polis-instituted process in the context of a considerable expansion of the Rhodian citizen body, and some of the elements of the narrative that underlie the construction of a group based on its ancestral place of worship. The historical context – the rebuttal of Demetrios and the consequent show of strength by the Rhodian polis, incorporating strategically important territories, and setting up grand votive offerings to Helios – is key to understanding the framework against which this local and localising identity was established.

Inclusivity and Exclusivity in Local Discourse That the Lindian response to the incorporation of new territories and citizens was not the only possible one can be seen if we look at the reaction to the same events by Kameiros, one of the other two tribal divisions, whose urban centre and territory was located on the north-western side of the island. A decree passed by this sub-polis body in the very same period (possibly even the very same year – 304 BCE) details the organisation of ktoinai, regional divisions that were smaller than demes and potentially predated these in Rhodian territory, each of which is charged with electing a mastros – one of the councillors that made up the tribal version of the boulē in Lindos, Kameiros, and Ialysos.48 It begins: ἔδοξε Καμιρεῦσι· τὰς κτοίνας τὰς Καμιρέων τὰς ἐν τᾶι νάσωι καὶ τὰς ἐν τᾶι ἀπείρωι ἀναγράψαι πάσας καὶ ἐχθέμειν ἐς τὸ ἰερὸν τᾶς Ἀθαναίας ἐστάλαι λιθίναι χωρὶς Χαλκῆς·

48

Badoud 2011: 551–53 with App. 1.

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The Kameirans decided: to inscribe all the ktoinai of the Kameirans, those on the island and those on the mainland, and to place them into the Sanctuary of Athena on a stone stēlē, except for Chalke.49

The Sanctuary of Athena referred to here is the one located on the Kameiran Acropolis, sacred to Athena Polias, with a similarly long, if perhaps less illustrious, history to its sister sanctuary at Lindos. Unlike the Lindian decree, the Kameiran text is emphasising and arranging for the inclusion of the new regions allocated to its tribe, apparently expanding its number of mastroi to reflect the incorporation of the new ktoinai in the peraia.50 The stēlē recording the complete list of Kameiran ktoinai, including those in the peraia, was to be set up in the Sanctuary of Athena Polias at Kameiros, contrasting starkly with the Lindian efforts to exclude peraians from their sanctuary of Athena, and summing up dramatically – and spatially – the different responses by the two tribes to the same historical event: the incorporation of the peraia. While both texts show the significance and centrality of each respective Athena sanctuary in housing stelai that conveyed and celebrated important decisions regarding civic and religious life, the tone and content is vastly different. The Kameiran document explicitly and deliberately includes its new deme-members, and their contribution to the tribal council, in its local religious centre, while the Lindians use their Sanctuary of Athena to display their rejection of these newcomers – albeit without ever naming them explicitly. Religious localities and spaces are a concern in both instances: while the Lindian decree is focused on keeping the hiera localised in Lindos, the Kameiran decree, before it breaks off, requires: ἐγ δὲ ταυτᾶν τᾶν κτοινᾶν ἀποδεικνύειν τοὺς κτοινάτας μαστρὸν ἐν τῶι ἰερῶι τῶι ἁγιωτάτωι ἐν τᾶι κτοίναι κατὰ τὸν νόμον τὸν τῶν Ῥοδίων. τοῦτοι δὲ συνλεγέσθων ἐν Καμίρωι εἰς τὸ ἰερὸν τᾶς Ἀθαναίας, ὅκκα τοὶ ἰεροποιοὶ παραγγέλ̣ ̣[λ]ωντι, καὶ ἀθρεόντω τὰ ἰερὰ τὰ Καμιρέων [τὰ δα][μο]τελῆ πάντα, αἴ τι[----] ̣ Within these ktoinai, that the ktoinatai appoint a mastros in the most sacred sanctuary in the ktoina, in accordance with the law of the Rhodians. And let these gather in Kameiros in the Sanctuary of Athena,

49 50

Tit. Cam. 109, ll. 1–4. With the exception of Chalke (l. 4), which had a special status; see Constantakopoulou 2007: 188–89; Badoud 2011: 547–50.

Shifting Identities and Defensive Localism

whenever the hieropoioi summon them, and let them inspect all the public hiera [. . .]

These regulations are partly about proper political procedures (the correct selection of council members), but they are also deeply concerned with sacred space and sanctuaries. Every ktoina is assumed to have multiple sanctuaries, the most sacred of which will serve as the setting for each mastros’ election. From their local sanctuary and the community it houses, these mastroi then proceed to the Sanctuary of Athena at Kameiros, where this stēlē was also displayed. The relationships thus expressed between the central Athena Sanctuary and each of these local sanctuaries mark out a very different concept of regional identity, with different communities linked like the spokes of a wheel to the central religious hub at Kameiros. It is revealed, furthermore, that one of the duties of these mastroi is the oversight of all the public hiera – again, these might denote cults or rites, but perhaps in this context sanctuaries are meant.51 The conception of the ‘local’ and its role in establishing religious community appears to look wildly different in Kameiros and Lindos in the late fourth century (and beyond). In fact, this opposition within the local discourse may itself have played a role in differentiating these identities. The ‘inclusive’ approach taken by the Kameirans might further be explained by pre-existing connections with the communities of the peraia, and may well illuminate religious networks of which we would otherwise be unaware. The mere existence of ‘ktoinai’ in territories outside the island of Rhodes has long been used by scholars to argue that parts of the Karian Chersonese had, in fact, been integrated into the territory of the Rhodian poleis earlier in the Classical period.52 While the evidence for any formal, political relationship is lacking, the connection of the ktoinai and their sanctuaries to the Athena Sanctuary of Kameiros might well point to preexisting religious and cultural links. Given Kameiros’ geographical location, in close vicinity not only to Syme and Chalke, but also the Karian peninsula, and arguably better connected to Loryma than it was to Lindos, such links should not surprise us. Under Hekatomnid influence, due to that dynasty’s interest in the naval corridor between the Knidian and Loryma peninsulas and the island of Rhodes, such connectivity would likely only

51

52

The uncertain meaning of ἀθρεόντω has been commented on, and is usually translated as ‘inspect’ or ‘oversee’; cf. Dignas 2003: 49; Boyxen 2018: 186, n. 27. LSJ s.v. ἀθρέω 1b, citing this inscription, gives ‘inspect’. Constantakopoulou 2007: 187–95, 243–44; this argument had originally been made by Fraser and Bean 1954: 94–98.

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have increased in the fourth century. Lindos, on the other hand, lying on the opposite side of the island, on its eastern coast, had fewer such natural connections to the mainland. Its sheltered harbour and position on major routes to the south and across the Aegean had certainly resulted in network links to Egypt, and as far as Sicily; however, the nature of such relationships, with more distant localities, was very different.53 While Lindians may well have had connections to Karpathos before 304 BCE, it is unlikely that they would have had as much to do with the communities of the Karian coastline. This provides not only a possible explanation for the markedly different responses to the events of 304 BCE by Lindos and Kameiros, it also highlights again the existence of religious communities and networks along lines that do not always conform to polis divisions. While 304 BCE, and the political incorporation of the peraia, was a good opportunity for Kameiros to formalise its relationship with these territories and bring them into its civic bodies, and undoubtedly brought changes to religious practice and identity, it also shows its close connection to worshipping communities that lay outside the ‘Rhodian’ identity as it is so often conceptualised. In this context, Christy Constantakopoulou’s observations about the mixed political community of Hellenistic Syme, which passed decrees as τὸ κοινὸν τῶν ἐν Σύμαι κατοικεύντων (‘the koinon of residents of Syme’), are significant, shining a light on further dimensions in which these simple political divisions are complicated. On second-century Syme, the community of ‘residents’, which surely included Rhodians from other demes and tribes but potentially even nonRhodians, apparently had the authority to confer civic honours; their particular interest in the local temple of Athena, which had been in disrepair, strongly suggests that they comprised a worshipping community too.54 The networks and micro-networks revealed by such finds show the complexity and variety of relationships that could influence religious as well as political identity. Furthermore, the case-study of these different Rhodian localities showcases the different ways in which dynamic religious discourse could develop even within the same polis, especially in a context in which many of these political divisions were recent creations.

53

54

Note the dedicatory offerings to Athena Lindia by Amasis and various groups from Akragas, Gela, and Sybaris in the Lindian Chronicle: LC 25–31. On the importance of the Greek West in the networks depicted in this inscription see Ampolo 2014. Constantakopoulou 2015: 225–28 with App. 1–2; IG XII.3 Suppl. 1269, 1270. For the repairs to the local sanctuary of Athena, see IG XII.3 Suppl. 1270 ll. 6–15.

Shifting Identities and Defensive Localism

Recasting Lindian Identity in Sacred Space Let me finally offer a sketch of how the distinct local religious identity of the ‘Lindians’, expressed in the late fourth century in a rebuttal of other Rhodians and especially new Rhodians, can be characterised. As I noted above, while in many ways artificial, a connection with ‘old Lindos’ and its religion was clearly established in the honorific stēlē examined, which is at pains to construct Lindian hiera as something continuous, not new, in the late fourth century. Does this conception of the ‘local’, and its narrative of exclusiveness and locality, remain constant if we look forward to the Hellenistic period? The Lindians’ exclusivity with regard to their religious offices has been much commented on in scholarship; the common line taken is that these priesthoods were competed for by the elite, and that keeping them exclusive was necessary for protecting them and the prestige they offered. The survival of inscribed catalogues of priests of Athena Lindia, Poseidon Hippios, and other more fragmentary lists, as well as large quantities of dedicatory and honorific statue bases that provide the names of hundreds of priests, have offered rich material for prosopographical analysis. Beate Dignas and others have argued strongly in favour of a kind of ‘religious cursus honorum’, whereby men could distinguish themselves by holding multiple priesthoods, structured by a hierarchy in which the eponymous priest of Athena Lindia was the highest position, only topped by the priesthood of Helios.55 While we should not overstate this argument, especially since there were numerous individuals who did not, as far as we can tell, hold more than one office, it is undeniable that several prominent Lindian families emphasised their achievements in this sphere. The familial pride becomes particularly noticeable in the statue groups set up in the late Hellenistic period on the Lindian Acropolis that combine the achievements of various family members, often of multiple generations, with a focus on Lindian priesthoods (especially that of Athena).56 The physical display and manifestation of family ties that took place in this way certainly had an impact on the Lindian community and its identity, but it is worth drawing attention to a related aspect that made these religious offices desirable to hold, something less nebulous than ‘prestige’: the concrete

55 56

Lippolis 1988–89: 118–23; Dignas 2003; see also Gabrielsen 1997: 130–36; Habicht 2005. E.g. I.Lindos 129, 145, 17. For families commemorating priesthoods in this way, including on Rhodes, see Ma 2013: 169–75, 190–91.

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possibility they offered of shaping and marking the sacred space of the Lindian Acropolis, that is, the Sanctuary of Athena Lindia. In our Lindian decree, the emphasis on space and the locality of the hiera was clear, both for the elections of religious officials, and for the hiera more generally. The spatial politics that governed greater, ‘international’ sanctuaries, such as Delphi and Olympia, and how dedications and other monuments could oscillate between the local and universal, has been discussed by Julia Kindt and Michael Scott in particular, but similar concerns could govern smaller sanctuaries too.57 In his study of the ‘political’ power and autonomy of Rhodian subdivisions, Gabrielsen found that the only circumstances in which their decrees are taken to the σύμπας δᾶμος (that is, the Rhodian polis assembly) to be ratified was in honorific contexts in which a sanctuary was sought out as the place for erecting the stēlē.58 Control of sacred spaces, and the monuments that could be placed within them, was an important matter, as in other sanctuaries in the Greek world. The interest in protecting the sacred space of Athena Lindia, and having some degree of control over it, should then be seen in this context, as an act of defensive localism. The cult, dating back centuries, and located in a striking topographical position in Lindos, was invested with great importance by Lindian Rhodians in the Hellenistic period: it was a key component in the narrative of continuous religion, strengthened by the stories of the ancient cult statue, the association of Pindar’s seventh Olympian with the origin of this Athena cult, and by setting up the long and detailed ‘Lindos stēlē’ or ‘Lindian Chronicle’ in 99 BCE.59 The significance not just of the cult, but specifically of its physical locality, also goes a long way in explaining the development of the epigraphic output we find at Lindos; unlike Kameiros, which sees a steady decline in the inscriptions set up as its urban and religious centre dwindles in the shadow of Rhodes-town, Lindos 57

58 59

Scott 2010; Kindt 2012: 123–40. See also Ma 2013: 107–09 on the spatial dynamics of honorific statues in civic sanctuaries, especially the Asklepieion at Epidauros. Gabrielsen 1994. Linked in most traditions to Danaus: Diod. Sic. 5.58 (Danaus founds sanctuary and sets up statue); Strabo 14.2.11 (Danaus founds sanctuary); Callim. F 100 Pfeiffer and Apollod. Bibl. 2.1.4 (Danaus sets up statue; from Kallimachos, we get the extra detail that it was a ‘simple’ image, λιτὸν ἕδος). On the appearance of this statue: Gaifman 2012: 88–90. Although this statue was likely replaced with a new one in the fourth century (see Blinkenberg 1917; Però 2012: 43–82), the continuation of this tradition in our sources shows that this image was not forgotten. Archaeological remains also suggest that the original base, with a rectangular slot for the aniconic cult image, was never removed from the temple’s cella, with the floor instead being raised to cover it: Lippolis 1988–89: 111–16. Gorgon FGrH 515 F 18: ταύτην τὴν ὠιδὴν (on the victory of Diagoras in 464) ἀνακεῖσθαί φησι Γόργων ἐν τῶι τῆς Λινδίας ᾽Αθηναίας ἱερῶι χρυσοῖς γράμμασιν; cf. Kowalzig 2007: 224–38. Also, Higbie 2003; Shaya 2005; Platt 2011: 161–69.

Shifting Identities and Defensive Localism

sees an impressive increase. This contrast is rooted in the site of the Lindian Sanctuary of Athena as an area of renewed importance for the religious experience and self-presentation of at least some groups of Lindians. The names of individuals on priest lists, statue bases, and other dedicatory monuments shaped the spatial dynamics of this sanctuary, marking out what it meant to be a ‘Lindian’ in Hellenistic Rhodes.

Conclusion This Rhodian case-study has highlighted a number of factors at play in the construction and interaction of local religious dynamics, as expressed in communities that identify themselves through common religious spaces and narratives within and sometimes in opposition to polis divisions. The first factor was that of political and social developments and tensions. Rhodian religious identity was deeply marked by the tumultuous events of the fourth century BCE; while the synoikism of the late fifth century and the foundation of a new city, with new cults and sanctuaries, had a profound influence on this identity, it also provided a framework in which communities could rebel or try to set themselves apart. The inscriptions that have been discussed here were set up, primarily, in a local context and for a local audience; the Lindian narrative of resistance would have had little meaning or significance outside Rhodes. While the identity that we saw constructed in this way defined itself in a political framework, it notably did not overlap neatly with polis divisions, demonstrating the potential limitations of such categories. The difference of the Kameiran community’s response to the incorporation of new territory and new citizens underlined the existence of alternative boundaries to religious identity, as we saw potential traces of earlier micro-regional networks resurfacing in the new political and cultic relationships. In both cases, the fundamental role of sacred space in shaping religious communities was apparent. The Lindians who set out to defend their hiera in the late fourth century focused their efforts to a great degree on the locality of their religious practices and experiences, and expressed their identity through participating and sharing in the Sanctuary of Athena Lindia in particular. In post-synoikism Kameiros, we noted the role that local sanctuaries played as touchstones for tying different communities to the religious centre of their Athena Sanctuary. Both instances thus also serve to highlight again the variety of ways in which religious communities overlapped with other communities or divisions; while this looks on the surface like an example of polis religion, it in

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fact complicates this concept. The shifting social imaginary of being Rhodian in this period, with a citizen body that underwent such drastic changes in its membership, created an environment in which different, overlapping, and competing religious identities and narratives were established. Finally, this examination demonstrates the continuing importance of the local perspective in Hellenistic Greek religion. Some aspects of the religious narrative propagated in this period, especially concerning the great age and epiphanic importance of Athena Lindia, can be seen as responses to the same wider Hellenistic conditions that generated, for example, the Magnesians’ emphasis on the international recognition of the authority of their goddess.60 However, I hope to have shown that the local audience, and Rhodian religious discourse, were key components in the construction of Lindian and Kameiran identity. The manner in which these ‘Lindioi’, so emphatically represented in the epigraphy of the Sanctuary of Lindian Athena, constructed their identity was primarily a product of the local discourse of late Classical Rhodes. In its response to this discourse, the formations of Lindian identity and community confronted, but also overlapped with, the competing religious imaginaries of the new polis.

Appendix: TRI 22 (cf. IG XII 1, 761) 1 ἔδοξε μαστροῖς καὶ Λινδίοις, ἐπιστατᾶν· ἐπειδὴ ἐπιστάται αἱρεθέντες ὑπὸ Λινδίων Ἀνάξανδρος Πάγωνος Καμύνδιος Λυσίας Λυσικράτευς Λαδάρ̣[μι]ος 5 Εὔβουλος Εὐθυμάχου Πάγιος καὶ τοὶ αἱρεθέντες ἄνδρες συναγωνίξασθαι ταῖς δίκαις Παυσανίας Πολυζάλου Βράσιος Ἀστυμέδων Ἀνδροσθένευς Λινδοπολίτας 10 Ἁγήσανδρος Πολυαράτου Ἀργεῖος Ἐπικράτης Ἁγησιδάμου Κλάσιος Τελέσων Δαμοσ[θέ]νευς Κλάσιος Φιλίων Ἀνδροσ[θέν]ευς Λινδοπολίτας Ἐπικράτης Πάγω[ν]ος Καμύνδιος 60

For the dossier of responses to Magnesia-on-the-Maeander’s requests for recognition of the Magnesians’ festival to Artemis Leukophryene see Syll.3 557–62; Platt 2011: 151–54 on the example of Magnesia demonstrating the significance of religious claims (such as epiphaneia) to establish a community’s centrality in the Hellenistic world.

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Διδυμακλῆς Φιλ ̣[ίν]ου Λινδοπολίτας Ἁγησίλοχος Ἁγ[ησά]νδρου Καττάβιος Ἀρχίνομος Φιλόφρονος Κλάσιος Ἀρχοκράτης Στρατοκλεῦς Βουλίδας Καλλίστρατος Νικοστράτου Νεττίδας Ἀλεξίμαχος Κλεανδρίδα Λαδάρμιος Ἀλεξίμαχος Μικύλου Λαδάρμιος Εὐκλῆς Ἁφαιστίωνος Ἀργεῖος Δεινίας Ἀνθαγόρα Λινδοπολίτας Ἵππασος Μικίωνος Λινδοπολίτας Καλλίγνωτος Δαμοσθένευς Κλάσιος Ἀριστόμαχος Ἀλεξάρχου Πεδιεύς Φαίνιππος Ἐπικράτευς Κλάσιος Νικαγόρας Ἀριστογένευς Νεττίδας Φιλοκράτης Δαμοκράτευς Λινδοπολίτας Κλεαγόρας Κομάτα Κλάσιος Ἁγησίστρατος Εὐδίκου Βουλίδας Πιστοκράτης Θευγένευς Κλάσιος Ξενοφῶν Κλείτωνος Βράσιος Φαέθων Φιλοκράτευς Λαδάρμιος Ἀλκιμέδων Φιλίωνος Λινδοπολίτας Ὀνομακλῆς Μελανώπου Λινδοπολίτας Θεαίδητος Πολυχάρμου Νεττίδας vacat ἄνδρες ἀγαθοὶ ἐγένοντο συν ̣διαφυλάξαντες Λινδίοις ὅπως ταὶ αἱρέσιες γίνωνται ἐν Λίνδωι τῶν ἱερέων κ[αὶ] ἱεροθυτᾶν κα[ὶ] ἱεροποιῶν καὶ τῶν ἄλλων τῶν ἐπὶ τὰ κοινὰ τασσομέν[ω]ν ἐξ αὐτῶν Λινδίων καθ’ ἃ καὶ ἐν τοῖς νόμοις γέγραπται κα[ὶ μ]ὴ ̣ μετέχωντι τῶν ἐν Λίνδωι ἱερῶν οἳ μὴ καὶ πρότερον μετεῖχον, δεδόχθαι τοῖς μαστροῖς καὶ Λινδίοις· ἐπαινέσαι αὐτοὺς ὅτι ἄνδρες ἀγαθοὶ ἐγένοντο περὶ τὰ ἱερὰ τὰ Λινδίων, καὶ ἀναγράψαι τόδε τὸ ψάφισμα ἐς στάλαν λιθίναν καὶ θέμειν ἐς τὸ ἱερὸν τᾶς Ἀθάνα[ς], ὅπως πᾶσιν τοῖς ἐπιγινομένοις φανερὸν ἦι, ὅτι Λίνδιοι τῶν ἀγαθῶν ἀνδρῶν μνάμαν ποιεῦνται ἐς τὸν ἅπαντα χρόνον· τὸ δὲ ἀνάλωμα τὸ ἐς τὰν στάλαν καὶ τὰν ἀναγραφὰν ὁ ἱερεὺς [τᾶς] Ἀθάνας τελεσάτω· ὅπως δὲ ἁ στάλα τεθῆι ἐς τὸ ἱερὸν τᾶς [Ἀ]θάνας, τοὶ ἐπιστάται ἐπιμεληθέντω τοὶ ἐν ἀρχᾶι ἐόντες.

The mastroi and the Lindians decided, concerning the epistatai; since the epistatai who were chosen by the Lindians: Anaxandros son of Pagon Kamyndios Lysias son of Lysikrates Ladarmios Euboulos son of Euthymachos Pagios

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and the men who were chosen to join in the action in the lawsuits: Pausanias son of Polyzalos Brasios Astymedon son of Androsthenes Lindopolitas Hagesandros son of Polyaratos Argeios Epikrates son of Hagesidamos Klasios Teleson son of Damosthenes Klasios Philion son of Androsthenes Lindopolitas Epikrates son of Pagon Kamyndios Didymakles son of Philinos Lindopolitas Hagesilochos son of Hagesandros Kattabios Archinomos son of Philophron Klasios Archokrates son of Stratokles Boulidas Kallistratos son of Nikstratos Nettidas Aleximachos son of Kleandridas Ladarmios Aleximoachos son of Mikylos Ladarmios Eukles son of Haphaistion Argeios Deinias son of Anthagoras Lindopolitas Hippasos son of Mikion Lindopolitas Kallignotos son of Damosthenes Klasios Aristomachos son of Alexarchos Pedieus Phainippos son of Epikrates Klasios Nikagoras son of Aristogenes Nettidas Philokrates son of Damokrates Lindopolitas Kleagoras son of Komatas Klasios Hagesistratos son of Eudikos Boulidas Pistokrates son of Theugenes Klasios Xenophon son of Kleiton Brasios Phaethon son of Philokrates Ladarmios Alkimedon son of Philion Lindopolitas Onomakles son of Melanopos Lindopolitas Theaidetos son of Polycharmos Nettidas They were good men, in that they safeguarded for the Lindians that the elections of the priests, hierothytai, hieropoioi and others carrying out the affairs of the community take place in Lindos and are done from the Lindians themselves, as prescribed by the laws, and that no-one participate in the hiera in Lindos who did not participate before, it was decided by the mastroi and Lindians: to praise them because they were good men concerning the hiera of the Lindians, and to inscribe this decree onto a stone stēlē and to place it into the Sanctuary of Athena, so that it may be visible for all who come after, that the Lindians made a memorial of good men for all time; the priest of Athena shall pay the cost for the stēlē and the inscription. The epistatai who are in power shall take care that the stēlē is placed in the Sanctuary of Athena.

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Finkielsztejn, G. (2001) Chronologie détaillée et révisée des éponymes amphoriques rhodiens, de 270 à 108 av. J.-C. environ: premier bilan. Oxford. Fraser, P. M. and G. E. Bean (1954) The Rhodian Peraea and Islands. London. Funke, P. (1980) ‘Stasis und politischer Umsturz in Rhodos zu Beginn des IV. Jahrhunderts v. Chr.’, in W. Eck, H. Galsterer and H. Wolff (eds.) Studien zur antiken Sozialgeschichte. Cologne, 59–70. Gabrielsen, V. (1994) ‘Subdivisions of the State and Their Decrees in Hellenistic Rhodes’. Classica Et Mediaevalia 45, 117–35. (1997) The Naval Aristocracy of Hellenistic Rhodes. Aarhus. (2000) ‘The Synoikized Polis of Rhodes’, in P. Flensted-Jensen, T. H. Nielsen and L. Rubinstein (eds.) Polis and Politics: Studies in Ancient Greek History: Presented to Mogens Herman Hansen on His Sixtieth Birthday, August 20, 2000. Copenhagen, 177–205. (2001) ‘The Rhodian Associations and Economic Activity’, in Z. H. Archibald et al. (eds.) Hellenistic Economies. London and New York, N.Y., 215–44. Gaifman, M. (2012) Aniconism in Greek Antiquity. Oxford. Habicht, C. (2005) ‘Notes on the Priests of Athena Lindia’, Studi Hellenistici 15, 71–78. Held, W. (2009) ‘Die Karer und die rhodische Peraia’, in F. Rumscheid (ed.) Die Karer und die Anderen: Internationales Kolloquium an der Freien Universität Berlin 13. bis 15. Oktober 2005. Bonn, 121–34. Higbie, C. (2003) The Lindian Chronicle and the Greek Creation of Their Past. Oxford. Hornblower, S. (1982) Mausolus. Oxford. Jones, N. F. (1987) Public Organization in Ancient Greece: A Documentary Study. Philadelphia, Pa. Kindt, J. (2012) Rethinking Greek Religion. Cambridge. Kowalzig, B. (2007) Singing for the Gods: Performances of Myth and Ritual in Archaic and Classical Greece. Oxford. Krauter, S. (2004) Bürgerrecht und Kultteilnahme: Politische und kultische Rechte und Pflichten in griechischen Poleis, Rom und antikem Judentum. Berlin. Lippolis, E. (1988–89) ‘Il santuario di Athana a Lindo’, Annuario Della Scuola Archeologica Di Atene e Delle Missioni Italiane in Oriente 48–49, 97–157. Ma, J. (2013) Statues and Cities: Honorific Portraits and Civic Identity in the Hellenistic World. Oxford. Maillot, S. (2012) ‘La formalisation des réseaux de mobilité méditerranéens. Remarques sur les associations à l’époque hellénistique’, in L. Capdetrey and J. Zurbach (eds.) Mobilités grecques: mouvements, réseaux, contacts en Méditerranée, de l’époque archaïque à l’époque hellénistique. Bordeaux, 235–60. (2015) ‘Foreigners’ Associations and the Rhodian State’, in V. Gabrielsen and C. Thomsen (eds.) Private Associations and the Public Sphere: Proceedings of

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a Symposium Held at the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, 9–11 September 2010. Copenhagen, 136–82. Matern, P. (2002) Helios und Sol: Kulte und Ikonographie des griechischen und römischen Sonnengottes. Istanbul. Migeotte, L. (1992) Les souscriptions publiques dans les cités grecques. Québec and Geneva. Morricone, L. (1952) ‘I sacerdoti di Halios’, Annuario Della Scuola Archeologica Di Atene e Delle Missioni Italiane in Oriente 11–13, 351–80. Papachristodoulou, I. (1999) ‘The Rhodian Demes within the Framework of the Function of the Rhodian State’, in V. Gabrielsen et al. (eds.) Hellenistic Rhodes: Politics, Culture, and Society. Aarhus, 27–44. Parker, R. (2009) ‘Subjection, Synoecism and Religious Life’, in P. Funke and N. Luraghi (eds.) The Politics of Ethnicity and the Crisis of the Peloponnesian League. Washington, D.C., 183–214. Paul, S. (2015) ‘Local Pantheons in Motion: Synoecism and Patron Deities in Hellenistic Rhodes’, CHS Research Bulletin 3(2). Però, A. (2012) La statua di Atena: Agalmatofilia nella ‘Cronaca’ di Lindos. Milan. Platt, V. (2011) Facing the Gods: Epiphany and Representation in Graeco-Roman Art, Literature and Religion. Cambridge. Pugliese Carratelli, G. (1951) ‘La formazione dello stato rodio’, Studi Classici e Orientali 1, 77–88. Rice, E. E. (1999) ‘Relations between Rhodes and the Rhodian Peraia’, in V. Gabrielsen et al. (eds.) Hellenistic Rhodes: Politics, Culture and Society. Aarhus, 45–54. Scott, M. (2010) Delphi and Olympia: The Spatial Politics of Panhellenism in the Archaic and Classical Periods. Cambridge and New York, N.Y. Shaya, J. (2005) ‘The Greek Temple as Museum: The Case of the Legendary Treasure of Athena from Lindos’, American Journal of Archaeology 109, 423–42. Vlassopoulos, K. (2015) ‘Religion in Communities’, in E. Eidinow and J. Kindt (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Greek Religion. Oxford, 257–71. Westlake, H. D. (1984) ‘Conon and Rhodes: The Troubled Aftermath of Synoecism’, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 24(4), 333–44. Wiemer, H.-U. (2011) ‘Early Hellenistic Rhodes: The Struggle for Independence and the Dream of Hegemony’, in A. Erskine and L. Llewellyn-Jones (eds.) Creating a Hellenistic World. Swansea, 123–46. Wijma, S. M. (2014) Embracing the Immigrant: The Participation of Metics in Athenian Polis Religion (5th–4th Century BC). Stuttgart.

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Between Local and Global? Religion in Late-Hellenistic Delos  

Throughout antiquity the Aegean Sea has been a highway for the movement of people, goods, and ideas. Its core region, the Cycladic Islands world, was appreciated by the Greeks as prime mover of their cultural and religious development. The island of Delos, famed birthplace of Apollo, was one of the eminent hot-spots of global connectivity in the Hellenistic world; the island was so much reliant on its network connections that without them, food supplies were in seasonal jeopardy. Demography put Delos on a special footing. A true multi-ethnic melting pot, religious life as evidenced in the composition of priesthoods and accoutrement of sanctuaries has long been found a curious tapestry of cultural traditions. Amidst omnipresent entanglement, this paper undertakes the quest for local religious signatures. Navigating through the insular topography and revisiting its major sanctuaries, Julietta Steinhauer traces the translocal dynamics in the exercise of religion. She argues that the local population, among many foreigners and immigrants, shaped their lived environment through various processes of cultural brokerage: by developing genuinely local cults such as that of Apollo, Zeus, and Athena Kynthios; by introducing new cults, sometimes upon the initiative of individuals or associations from outside the island; and third, by locally appropriating global cults, for instance that of Isis and Serapis. Combining these dimensions, the Delians crafted a religious pluriverse that was moulded and tied to the local specificities of their island.

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What constitutes the local in a place like Delos, one of the best-connected poleis in the Aegean in the late Hellenistic period? What regional sphere might be considered local to an island as small as Delos if every journey departing the polis was necessarily by boat? Was Delos more local than the poleis of mainland Greece due to its ‘insular’ existence, and was it more global with regard to its status as a trans-Mediterranean marketplace? Two factors are crucial to any discussion of the local dimension of religion in relation to Delos: first, Delian ‘insularity’ and how this effects what we perceive as the local; second, what can an understanding of the local dimension of Greek religion on Delos tell us about Greek religion more generally? Using case studies, I will argue that by looking at the local dimension of Greek religion we can not only understand the dynamics

Between Local and Global?

and shifting perceptions of the local but equally comprehend larger trends in Greek religion at the end of the Hellenistic period. To fully comprehend local religion conceptually and factually, we need to understand not only what constitutes local, regional, and global spheres but also how they functioned and, perhaps most importantly, how they interacted. The Delian global ‘connectedness’, especially between the east and the west, was intrinsically linked to the ability to sail, which can be seen, for example, in the island’s grain prices, correlating with the shipping season.1 This was a volatile factor that may have led to a state of isolation, especially during the closed sailing season in winter.2 However, it does not mean that the island was cut off from regional traffic. In fact, most of the Aegean islands were connected by other means, namely through cabotage and porthemeutikē (ferrying), both dependent on the weather of the day of travel rather than the season.3 Thinking of Delos as cut off during the winter might be true only for traffic from places that were too far to reach by such means, such as Egypt, Syria, or Rome but not the neighbouring islands. Gary Reger argued that Delos and its immediate Cycladic neighbours formed a sort of ‘regional market’ for grain, for instance.4 I therefore contextualise the Delian local with the neighbouring islands that, despite being a boat-trip away, can be seen as the regional to the local and leaving the island only occasionally in a state of isolation, if at all.5 Having established the regional as a set of islands, what are the consequences for our understanding of the local on Delos? Delos has been traditionally seen as the centre of its ‘region’, the Cycladic Islands. This is partly due to its inclusion in mythology, providing a strong local (religious) identity as the birthplace of Apollo. This local identity led to the regional importance of Delos: the establishment of the Sanctuary of Apollo elevated the island to a regional centre of the Aegean, for example for banking, among other economic activities.6 A third, ‘universal’ dimension was an equally important factor in defining the local on Delos as it connected the local with the global as well as the regional. Each dimension is intrinsically 1 2

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Reger 1993: 317, and on the Delian winter-isolation 328. The many votives at the sanctuaries of the Egyptian gods and especially those dedicated to Isis, goddess of seafaring, bear witness to the importance of the sailing season to Delians and visitors alike; see Bruneau 1963. Constantakopoulou 2007, on cabotage and porthemeutikē (ferrying): 176, 222–26. Evidence for Delos: 226. Reger 1993: 329–30. To what extent Rhenea would count as region in this model and to what extent as part of ‘Delos’ is debateable. Constantakopoulou 2017: 19.

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linked with one another – on Delos and elsewhere. Yet the way in which these three dimensions are interconnected, strengthened and shaped are local and unique to each locale. On Delos, one might argue, the local and global were particularly effectively intertwined. This is true for the interplay between local agriculture, textile industry (or at least local purple dye), and its role as marketplace for goods and enslaved individuals, shipped between east and west, which necessarily created a local entertainment industry. While other local resources such as pōros and marble were used in particular in the second century BCE to build the majority of the Hellenistic houses and new sanctuaries of the mushrooming city, here too, additional marble was imported to shape the ‘new local’ in the city centre by Naxians, Parians, and Athenians. At the same time, the exploitation of the local quarries completely changed the island’s natural landscape within a few decades.7 The interrelatedness of local and global elements equally characterises Delian local religion and Delian society of the second and first centuries BCE. The Sanctuary of Apollo and the festival of the Delia are powerful examples of the local in a physical and religious sense and at the same time prime examples of this binary character. As the Hymn to Apollo attests, the sanctuary provided essential support for the population of Delos and points at the same time to the barrenness of its soil.8 It has been argued that the island, owing to its size and meagre natural resources, could only ever feed a handful of families at any given time.9 Yet, the sanctuary and festival drew visitors on a global scale, creating networks that reached way beyond the physically local and, in fact, bound the local and the global together in interdependence.10 The community of worshippers of Delian Apollo, often themselves locals elsewhere, clearly associated the god with Delos. They 7 8

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Hadjidakis, Matarangas and Varti-Matarangas 2009: 284–86. Hom. Hymn Apo. 51–60: ‘Delos, if you would be willing to be the abode of my dear son / Phoibos Apollo, and here to establish for him a great sumptuous temple – / since no other will touch you; of that you will not be unmindful, / nor, I believe, will you be at all wealthy in cattle and sheep flocks, / nor will you bring forth grapes or produce an abundance of produce – / if you contain, however, the shrine of far-shooting Apollo, / people will all be bringing to you their hecatombs hither, / when they gather together; the measureless savor of fat will / always rise from the fires – your inhabitants you will be feeding / out of those foreigners’ hands, for in truth your soil is not fertile’ (transl. R. Merrill at https://chs.harvard.edu/chapter/8-the-homerichymn-to-apollo-translated-by-rodney-merrill/). Constantakopoulou 2017: 4. Reger is more careful and points to the excavated farms and local barley cultivation and argues that the island was perhaps more independent than previously suggested; Reger 1993: 330. In fact, Bruneau 1970: 79 argued that due to the changing demographics after 166 BCE, the Apollonia were transformed from a ‘fête Délienne’ to a festival that now reflected the

Between Local and Global?

were, however, not necessarily bound to the physical level of the local but to a metaphorical one, by context: the Delian Apollo could be worshipped in Athens, Alexandria, or Syracuse and would still be associated with Delos. On a practical level, we can observe a distinguishing feature of Delian local religion in the second century: unlike other islands with similar levels of connectivity such as Rhodes or Cos, where in the second century an exclusive local religious identity was created via measures such as restricted access to religious offices to citizens only, no such efforts were made here. In fact, Delian local religion was constantly negotiated and defined by its multi-ethnic inhabitants, who founded and maintained their own sanctuaries and served as priests, combining local, regional, and global dimensions, at least initially.11 In the second half of the second century BCE, as a result of the second Athenian occupation, the majority of administrative and honorary offices in the Delian sanctuaries fell into Athenian hands. In this chapter I explore the local dimension of Delian religion in a period where Delos itself was governed not by the Delians but by Athenians. Delian society as well as its religion was deeply transformed by its Athenian occupiers and large numbers of immigrants, many of whom now claimed Delos as their home, at least temporarily.12 This influx of immigrants from places beyond the regional sphere had important consequences for the development of local religion on Delos: individuals that did not share the immediate regional pantheon set up cults to the gods of their hometowns and lands in relatively large numbers, a development not known from anywhere else in the Greek Hellenistic world. This dynamic, I suggest, can be best described with the term translocal, that is local cults linked to a place physically that were then transferred to Delos. I will use the term throughout this chapter. As a consequence, Delians, Athenians, and other immigrants alike shaped their new physical local in three dimensions: first, by supporting and developing local cults such as those of Apollo, Zeus, and Athena Kynthios; second, by introducing translocal cults, such as the cult of the gods of Ascalon, set up by an individual immigrant, or the Poseidoniastai of Berytos, an association of merchants from Berytos; and third, global cults such as that of Isis and

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cosmopolitan character of the Delian population. Similarly, Christy Constantakopoulou (2017) in her analysis of the dedicants visiting the sanctuary of Apollo. The sanctuaries of the Egyptian and Syrian gods were both founded by immigrants, as were the thirteen translocal sanctuaries on Mount Kynthos. See Steinhauer 2014: 52–61; Steinhauer forthcoming. On the institutional takeover of the Delian sanctuaries by Athenians, see Steinhauer 2014: 66–68.

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Serapis, which, at this point in time, had been de-rooted and globalised. By combining these three dimensions, the population of Delos created a new local religious dimension that helped individuals navigate their daily lives within the ‘triangle of place, knowledgeability, and communication’ which, according to Hans Beck is ‘a landmark trait of the local’.13 We see on Delos a dynamic yet ordered space with clear rules and old as well as new traditions, and individuals negotiating these within the physical and metaphysical local in a defined space in a time of change and disruption. Local religion, then, is best described as constantly shifting and dynamic, incorporating traditions and innovations shaped by locals for their individual needs, offering familiarity as well as the option to establish new traditions and practise old ones at any given time. This dynamic, and the binary dimension of local religion incorporating global and local aspects, may explain the locally unique religious practices that we encounter at the end of the Hellenistic period, reflective of an ever more ‘globalised’ Mediterranean at the beginning of a new political era.

Local Religion Crowning Mount Kynthos, just 112 m above sea level, lay the remains of the Kynthion, a hilltop sanctuary dedicated to Zeus Kynthios and Athena Kynthia (no. 105 on Fig. 10.1). This sanctuary, like that of Apollo, is necessarily connected to the place as it is built on and connects to a significant landmark, clearly linked to Delian topography. It hosted a pre-Hellenic settlement from the early Cycladic period and was possibly one of the earliest sanctuaries on the island.14 It had been used as a cult site at least since the Archaic period, after an even earlier settlement had been abandoned.15 If we look at the Kynthion from an anthropological perspective, that is, arguing that all religions were initially products of local selfcontained and isolated groups with a strong sense of group solidarity, then the pre-Archaic and Archaic Kynthion might just fall into that category: 13

14

15

The physical local according to Hans Beck: ‘the average city-state was experienceable. In other words, the knowledge of people about their local area was acquirable through first hand encounters with place, and it was communicated directly and between individuals who were, in principle, equally familiar with and knowledgeable about the quotidian horizon. This triangle of place, knowledgeability, and communication marks not only a landmark trait of the local, but also a decisive distinction between local and nonlocal realms.’ Beck 2020: 30–33. On the early Cycladic settlement, see MacGillivray 1980, and for the earliest sanctuary Plassart 1928: 11–50. Plassart 1928: 51–52.

Between Local and Global?

Figure 10.1 Sanctuaries on mount Kynthos, Delos (after Bruneau and Ducat 1983).

while Zeus and Athena were clearly not only local, their association with this particular place makes them locals.16 The remains of the sanctuary that are still visible today date to the period of Delian independence in the fourth century BCE and the sanctuary’s heyday in the second period of occupation (166–88 BCE), when it was enlarged and dedications were more numerous and generous than before.17 The sanctuary’s main architectural features were two oikoi, probably one to Zeus and one to Athena with later additions of an exedra and a Doric prostylos at the entrance to the sanctuary. The magnification of the entrance area went hand in hand with the enlargement of the staircase.18 Several terraces with mosaic floors as well as other, privately dedicated rooms, were added in the first century BCE. The general increase in dedications is probably connected to the fact that more individuals than ever were now living on the island. Equally, Zeus and especially Athena were deities particularly dear to the Athenians who 16 17 18

Eller 2015: 177. Bruneau 1970: 225 and the inventory list ID 1403, ll. 27–33, 165–157/156 BCE for the Kynthion. Bruneau 1970: 225.

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had taken over the administration of the sanctuary and were now in charge of the priesthoods.19 However, the sanctuary appealed not only to those familiar with these gods but also to non-Athenians and non-Delians such as Philostratos of Gaza, who became a zakoros at the Kynthion, or Apollonides of Laodikeia, who dedicated a mosaic pavement.20 These two examples are representative of a shift in the expression and dimension of local religion on Delos. The humble hilltop Sanctuary of Zeus and Athena Kynthios, two gods initially worshipped probably by local inhabitants only, was now transformed into an impressive precinct with mosaic floors and a proper portico. The worshipping community of benefactors that enabled the development of the sanctuary was made up of individuals from places as far away as Gaza. Yet they wished to honour the very local gods and take part in shaping the physical dimension of the local in the form of the sanctuary, bound to the place, and giving it an individual ‘touch’ by dedicating features such as columns made out of local stone, mosaics, and exedras that were particularly common on Delos, therewith shaping the ‘new’ local. The example of the Sanctuary of Zeus and Athena Kynthios has demonstrated the malleable and dynamic nature of local religion. It kept its prominent place within and connection to Delian local religion. At the same time its character changed and with this Delian local religion. It now mirrored the changing demographics of the locals and reflected the interconnections of the island which had become the ‘new’ local. Individuals such as Philostratos of Gaza were, by engaging with the oldest local sanctuary on the island, able to experience local religion while at the same time shaping this experience to suit their own ideas of the new local religion.

Translocal Cults As we have seen in the example of the worshippers at the Kynthion, local religion was as much shaped by local topography as it was by the 19

20

Eighteen inscriptions were dedications made by Athenians. However, ID 1723 records an Ascalonite, ID 1893 a Romaios, ID 1869 a Gazaian, and ID 1532 an Alexandrian worshipper. Priestly offices such as the zakoros could be taken up by non-Athenians, as the example of Philostratos, a zakoros from Gaza (ID 1896) shows. ID 2420. On the inscription and for the identification of kataklyston as a hitherto unknown word for ‘pavement’, see Bruneau 1967: 423–25 and 1970: 225. The ‘locals’, the Delians, are clearly underrepresented in the inscriptions of the second and first centuries, but this seems to be a trait of Delian epigraphy in the second and first centuries rather than an actual reflection of their existence and activities.

Between Local and Global?

inhabitants of a place. The latter is particularly true for what I have coined ‘translocal’ cults, that is cults which have been taken or perhaps ‘copied’ from their original local topographical contexts and transported into a new environment, often far away from their original local spheres. Such translocal cults held much importance for immigrants who through them were connected to their ‘original’ local religion and recreated a sense of belonging in their new environments. Such translocal cults, however, often only lasted for as long as the individual immigrant or group were actively worshipping and – in many cases – never became long-lasting pillars of local Greek religion. Take, for example, the sanctuary of the gods of Ascalon. The sanctuary was located approximately 20 metres below the peak of Mount Kynthos, in close proximity to thirteen partially identifiable sanctuaries of the same ‘oriental’ style that were scattered across the slopes of Mount Kynthos, all dating to the end of the second or beginning of the first century BCE. The open-courtyard sanctuary in question was equipped with a hearth and benches and could be identified via several inscriptions as a shrine dedicated to Poseidon of Ascalon and Palestinian Astarte Aphrodite Ourania. The dedications were inscribed on decorated altars that were found within and in the immediate surroundings of the precinct.21 It was erected by Philostratos, a well-known banker originating from Ascalon with a business on Delos.22 The dedication, inscribed on an altar, was made on behalf of his wife and children, as well as the city of the Ascalonites. Philostratos makes it clear in the inscription that he is a banker on the island (τραπ[εζιτεύων] / ἐν Δήλωι), and he and his family were probably all residents on Delos at the time when the sanctuary was built. Two further inscriptions were found in the precinct, each are dedications to Palestinian Astarte Aphrodite Ourania (ID 1719, ca. 100 BCE) and to Poseidon of Ascalon (ID 1721, 100 BCE), both in his wife’s and children’s names and of the city of the Ascalonites. The dedicatory inscription to Poseidon of Ascalon doubles as a sacrificial instruction and excludes the sacrifice of pigs and goats. The sanctuary was slightly larger than most of the neighbouring open-courtyard sanctuaries (8  4.60 m) and fitted snugly against the slope of the mountain. Reaching the sanctuary would 21 22

Plassart 1928: 287. ID 1720 = CGRN 216, 100 BCE: Φιλόστρατος Φιλοστράτου/Ἀσκαλωνίτης τραπ[εζιτεύων]/ἐν Δήλωι, ὑπὲρ τ[ῆς Ἀσκα]λ[ωνι]-/τῶν πόλεως καὶ γυ-/ναικὸς/ (5) καὶ τέκν[ων]/Ποσειδῶνι Ἀσκαλ[ωνίτῃ]./Vacat/ὑικὰ μὴ θύειν/μηδ[ὲ] αἴ[γ]ει[α], ‘Philostatros son of Philostratos, banker on Delos, on behalf of the city of the Ascalonites and (5) his wife and children, to Poseidon of Ascalon. Do not sacrifice any swine (products) or any goat (products)’ (transl. CGRN). On Philostratos and his business more generally see Leiwo 1989.

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have taken some effort as it was not connected to the main staircase leading up to the Kynthion or by the path leading down to the other sanctuaries. It was used by the family and perhaps his acquaintances, resident on Delos. By introducing gods that originated in local religious structures elsewhere, Philostratos was able to bring a part of his local religion with him as he migrated and to create a point of connection for his fellow Ascalonites and himself on Delos, while evidently making a personal mark in the local religious landscape of the island. Another 50 metres north-east of the Sanctuary of the gods of Ascalon, a group of three fellow citizens of Iamneia, modern Yavne on the Israeli coast and once a major Hellenistic trading port, dedicated a smaller (4  3.5 m) but otherwise very similar ‘oriental-style’ open-courtyard sanctuary (L, not indicated on Fig. 10.1 but located between K and M).23 The dedication was inscribed on a small marble base and was made on behalf of the three men’s siblings, their families and people of their hometown, to Herakles and Horon, the gods who possessed Iamneia.24 The inscription, simultaneously a sacred regulation, just like the dedication to Poseidon of Ascalon, prohibits the sacrifice of a goat. In both sanctuaries, those of the gods of Ascalon and of Iamneia, specific local customs were transferred to Delos, bringing a new element to local traditions and religious customs on the island, effectively shaping and widening the island’s local religious dimension in more than one way: the Sanctuary of the gods of Ascalon and of the gods of Iamneia, as well as the remaining shrines which were dedicated to other Levantine, mostly local gods by individuals just like Philostratos, were shaped as triclinia in which the sacrificial meal would have been consumed on benches.25 This tradition was adopted from Marzēah groups, _ religious ‘associations’ known from the Levant that translated into thiasoi on Delos.26 The introduction of the Marzēah to Delos from at least the _ early third century, closely linked to specific local deities, is a prime example of the mechanics of translocal cults and religion: such cults are 23 24

25 26

Fischer 2003: 246. ID 2308. ID 2308: Ἡρακλῇ καὶ Αὑρώ- / νᾳ, θεοῖς Ἰάμνει- / αν κατέχουσιν, / Ζηνόδωρος, Πά- / (5) τρων, Διόδοτος, ‘To Heracles and Haurona, gods possessing Iamnia, Zenodoros, Patron, Diodotos, Iamnitans, on behalf of themselves and their siblings and their family and their fellow-citizens, as a thank-offering. One may sacrifice everything except (something) of the goat’ (transl. CGRN). Horon was also referred to as Horon of Iabne/Iamnia. For the inscription and the sanctuary see Plassart 1928: 278–79. A list of findings and dedications can be found in Bruneau 1970: 475–78. For example, in a bilingual (Phoenician and Greek) grave epitaph from Rhenea, we learn about the synthiasitai (fellow member of the thiasos) of a certain Dioskyrides, originating from Qedemot in Jordan; SEG LVII:760, ca. 300 BCE.

Between Local and Global?

characterised by their voluntary nature and individuals’ initiatives as opposed to cults and rituals established, regulated, and maintained by political bodies for entire communities and beyond.27 While the cults of these deities were physically established on Delos, the ritual sacrifice performed within the contexts of these sanctuaries seems to have adhered to traditions that were local elsewhere and were never established as normative in the Greek and Roman world. Perhaps within this framework of translocal religion also fit the associations of merchants and shipowners on Delos, not dissimilar to the individuals setting up the small shrines on Mount Kynthos, at least at an initial stage. These associations worshipped the local gods of their hometowns, the most famous of which are the Poseidoniastai of Berytos and the Herakleistai of Tyre, both eponymous of their respective local deity.28 The Herakleistai were planning to erect a building that served the purpose of worship, as well as creating space for socio-economic gatherings, just as the Posidoniastai had done earlier. Their establishment was a splendid multi-purpose building erected in the religious and commercial centre of Delos in close proximity to the sacred lake and the Agora of the Italians.29 The architecture and furnishings of the building have been thoroughly discussed, so for the purposes of this paper, I will focus only on several aspects highlighting the religious dynamics of the group.30 One of the main activities of the group was the communal meal that was taken in the second largest room of the building (211 m2). The room was decorated with exquisite wall-paintings and stuccoed walls and ceilings. It was equipped with 19–20 dining couches.31 We cannot state with certainty the exact date of the founding of the association. The building itself was erected in the middle of the second century BCE and the earliest inscription dates to 153/ 152 BCE.32 What we can say, however, is that the translocal element of the group that was probably the catalyst for its foundation was kept throughout, both in name and practice. We have two naioi dedicated to Poseidon of Berytos and Astarte and one naos to an unknown deity. Slightly later, a fourth naos shows that the repertoire was enlarged to include other, translocal gods: now, the goddess Roma, introduced by the Roman 27

28

29 31

‘Translocal religions tend to be voluntary movements or associations, which individuals can join by intentional decision . . . they tend to be “individualistic” in a critical sense’ (Eller 2015: 178). On the poseidoniastai and their precinct see Picard 1920; 1921; Trümper 2002. For the Herakleistai worshipping the Tyrian Herakles (Melqart), who apply in Athens for the right to buy a plot of land to build a temenos to their god, see ID 1519. 30 No. 57 in the Guide de Delos (Bruneau and Ducat 1983). See note 28. 32 Nielsen 2015: 148. ID 1520.

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merchants on Delos, became one of the gods worshipped in this establishment. While there are many dedications by the association to Apollo, the sanctuary itself stayed true to its original purpose, the worship of gods that were local, but local elsewhere, such as Roma and Poseidon of Berytos. While there may have been other reasons too, the most probable motivation for an individual to worship the gods of their hometown in a fixed establishment, thousands of miles away across the Mediterranean, was surely for that individual to keep in touch with their origins. On Delos in particular, where we find groups of individuals from the same city, many of whom will have had familial and ongoing economic connections to their hometowns, this makes good sense. At the same time, surely, this was as much about traditional bonds with the Heimat and origins as it was about creating a new local. This new local was necessarily shaped by the old local that had now become translocal and thereby contributed to the Delian ‘new local’. However, unlike the global cults discussed in the next section, translocal cults had no impact on the broader context of Greek religion. Most of the translocal cults were in many ways only ever functioning in a first phase in the new local, for a few generations only. Rarely did they become global phenomena. In most cases, they fell victim to the religious competition of the second century BCE.33

Global Cults in Delian Local Religion The important role Delos and the nature of Delian local religion played in the processes of the ‘globalisation’ and spread of the cult of the goddess Isis to Greece and the West has been highlighted since the earliest studies of ‘Isiac religion’ in the 1970s.34 This section will look closely at the role that Delian local religion played in the making of Isis and the extent to which Isis made Delian local religion what it became in the second and first centuries BCE by focusing on the internal developments of the sanctuaries of the Egyptian gods on the island. To start with, it is perhaps necessary to say a few words about the global character of Isis as proposed in scholarship. After several centuries of appropriation and inter-cultural exchange, including in the Egyptian sanctuaries of Delos, Isis had become what one

33

34

For a general analysis of the evolution of ancient religions, see Woolf 2017, and for religious competition see p. 32 of the same work. Malaise 1972; Dunand 1973.

Between Local and Global?

might call a global deity.35 The mechanics that elevated an initially Egyptian goddess to a global goddess can be explained to an extent by the system of the Hellenistic koine that facilitated the goddess’ ‘globalisation’ and her ability to change and innovate while keeping ‘traditional’ features.36 Isis’ global character and the phenomenon of her widespread worship have been studied in depth.37 In addition, this section shows that on Delos we can not only trace the practical processes behind the cult’s globalisation, but equally see that these dynamics were facilitated by the demographically diverse Delian locals and Delian local religion itself. Serapeion C on Delos is a case in point. For the purposes of this chapter, I will only touch upon the composition of the multi-ethnic community of worshippers as such – that in itself arguably represents the global aspect of the island as well. I will focus on the agency of the community itself, which resulted in practical developments within the sanctuary and its ritual functions over a period of approximately 100 years.38 These processes illustrate the way in which a global cult is locally embedded and moulded to provide the stability needed in people’s everyday lives and representing the immediacy of the local aspect of religion. The sanctuary (Fig. 10.2) was probably erected as the third of three Serapeia on the island at the end of the third or beginning of the second century BCE, and it became a ‘public’ sanctuary from around 180 BCE onwards.39 Its main architectural features included two courts, a quadrangular court (G) and a slightly smaller trapezoidal court (E), leading to a ‘dromos’ or alleyway perhaps reminiscent of Egyptian sanctuaries in shape and lined with sixteen Sphinxes.40 Within the precinct, four naoi were located. As most houses and sanctuaries on the island – with the exception of the Agora of the Italians that boasted marble columns from as far away as Attica – the sanctuary was mostly constructed from local stone.41 The Egyptian gods, and in particular the god Serapis, were allegedly introduced on Delos as early as the first quarter of the third century BCE by 35 36

37

38

39

40

For a definition of ‘global deities’ and Isis’ place among these, see Woolf 2018–19: 113. For a comprehensive overview of the development of Isis’ cult from an Egyptian to a global cult, see Woolf 2014: 74–80 and Versluys 2015: 148–50. On the role of Delos in the diffusion of the cult, see e.g. Dunand 1973; Baslez 1977; Malaise 1984; Bricault 2004; and more generally on the spread of the cult Bricault 2013; Bricault, Versluys and Meyboom 2007; Malaise 2000; 2007; Matricon-Thomas 2012. For the community of worshippers see Steinhauer 2014: 82–86; 2019: 231–34; Steinhauer forthcoming. Or at least a Serapeion with a dromos appears in the inventories of that year (ID 2041); Bruneau 1970: 462; 1980: 161; Brun and Leguilloux 2013: 168. 41 Bruneau 1980: 187. Hadjidakis, Matarangas and Varti-Matarangas 2009: 284–85.

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Figure 10.2 Serapeion C, Delos (after Bruneau 1980: 162).

an individual priest from Memphis.42 The worship of Serapis went hand in hand with that of his consort Isis, as documented in the epigraphic and archaeological evidence.43 In fact, most inscriptions found within the vicinity of any of the three Serapeia were dedicated to the Delian triad Serapis, Isis and Anubis.44 This combination of gods, in itself a local feature of Delos that differed from the more common triad of Isis, Serapis/Osiris and Harpokrates/Horus, was the most common way of addressing the Egyptian gods in votive inscriptions on the island. We do not know why it was Anubis in particular who joined Isis and Serapis or precisely what made the cult of the Egyptian gods so successful an enterprise, but it seems to have been a combination of the global aspect of the cult and the local dynamic on Delos.45 This local dynamic allowed a diverse and vibrant religious ‘landscape’ to flourish, leaving us with deities and their epithets attested here only.46 The sanctuary’s four naoi were erected for the various gods worshipped in the precinct at different periods in time.47 At the centre of the main court in the north of the sanctuary stood a temple, F, identified as dedicated

42 43

44 45

46 47

IG XI4 1299 = RICIS 202/0101 ll. 2–11 and note 43. The establishment of the ‘first’ Serapeion on Delos by the Memphite priest Apollonius II’s grandfather as well as the sanctuary itself are discussed in detail in Engelmann 1975; Siard 1998; Dignas 2008: 75–82; Moyer 2011: 142–207. Bruneau 1970: 463. Anubis’ connection to the Greek Hermes and Roman Mercury, god of travel and merchants, might have been an important aspect as the sanctuary served merchants and travellers alike. Bruneau 1970: 475–78. Besides these deities, a large number of other named gods, such as Asklepios and unnamed gods that dwelled in the temple, theoi synnaioi, were also worshipped here.

Between Local and Global?

to Serapis and dating back to the beginning of the second century BCE.48 Ten metres eastwards and on a slightly higher level stood temple H, probably dedicated to Isis, Serapis and Anubis, although the evidence is inconclusive.49 Immediately next to it, to the south, stood temple I, dedicated to Isis by the Athenians at around 150 BCE.50 The fact that the Athenians dedicated the temple is no surprise, since the sanctuary, the second wealthiest on the island, became popular with the Athenian occupiers. The temple was administered by Athenians soon after the occupation in 166, and all priestly offices were taken over by them. Athenians were also involved in grassroots support for the sanctuary.51 Leaving the political dimension of the Athenian actions aside, there is a further point to be considered here. The temple was dedicated as a votive offering, but at the same time it was a clear effort to shape the local religious landscape in the way that the Athenians saw fit. This was perhaps because Isis had not previously had an individual temple within the Serapeion C and it was seen as a necessary addition to honour the goddess more prominently. It could also have been due to the prevalence of the Athenians to worship Isis, known to them locally since the fourth century BCE, or, most likely, both.52 The fact that the sanctuary (Serapeion) and its priests were officially named after the god Serapis rather than Isis highlights the Athenian effort to include the global goddess visibly and effectively in the local cult of the Egyptian gods on Delos.53 At this point in time, Serapis had already been worshipped for more than 150 years locally, and the focus on Isis rather than Serapis by the Athenian dedication connected the Delian local cult more strongly to the global sphere. The example of the fourth naos, C, illustrates the creative character of local religion and the interplay of global and local. The naos is situated in the back of the southern side of the dromos, visually creating the focal point of the dromos of the sphinxes (see Fig. 10.3). The building was identified initially by René Vallois as a Metroon that was known from inscriptions found in the vicinity.54 His thesis was refuted

48 49

50 51

52 54

Siard 2008: 27. ID 2042 (135/134 BCE) mentions a dedication of a monument to Serapis, Isis, and Anubis and was engraved on a slab with an Ionian frieze, probably an architrave, but whether it actually referred to this naos is unclear. Siard 2008: 28 and ID 2044. For a list of the known priests see Bricault 2013: appendix. For the involvement of Athenians in the subscriptions supporting the erection of a Hydreion, see Steinhauer 2019: 230–31. 53 IG II3 1 337, 333/332 BCE. Bruneau 1970: 563–64. Ibid.: 462; R. Vallois, AHD, I: 86–92.

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Figure 10.3 Dromos and Naos C in Serapeion C, Delos. Drawing by Frédéric Siard (in Brun Kyriakidis 2021: plate 25, printed with permission).

by Philippe Bruneau in 1980 who instead suggested that the building had served as a temple of Isis.55 Most recently, Hélène Siard argued that the building was erected as a temple to a hitherto unknown deity, Hydreios.56 During her excavation that focused on temple C, Siard discovered the hydraulic function of the naos which constituted of a square well as its cella.57 Her findings also showed that the structure was built much later than previously suggested, namely after 130 BCE, together with the dromos of the sphinxes, and was therefore a later addition to the sanctuary.58 An inscription dating to the beginning of the first century BCE informs us about the individual responsible for the paving of the dromos, the dedication of the sphinxes, and several altars: a certain Demetrios of Alexandria.59 The dedication was made to Isis, Serapis, Anubis Harpokrates, and Hydreios. This dedication and two further texts mentioning Hydreios were found in Serapeion C.60 We have epigraphic evidence dating from the same 55 59

60

56 57 58 Bruneau 1980: 169–75. Siard 2007. Ibid.: 418–20. Ibid.: 418. ID 2087 and ID 2088 = RICIS 202/0342–343; on the reconstruction of the name see commentary RICIS (I) 288. RICIS 202/0323 = ID 2155; RICIS 202/0344 = ID 2160 (95/94 BCE).

Between Local and Global?

time which confirms payments for the restoration of a ‘Hydreion’ (and other facilities) made possible by the donations of the multi-ethnic associations that worshipped together at the Serapeion.61 These subscription lists contained up to over 100 names, signifying the importance of the sacred space and the communal aspect of taking part in creating it.62 Yet another inscription mentions the gift or dedication of a building stone of the ‘Hydreion’, followed by a list of therapeutai paying for the expenses.63 The architectural and epigraphic evidence taken together suggests that the sanctuary included/featured a ‘Hydreion’, an architectural structure that probably served as a reservoir or water crypt, as known from other sanctuaries. In fact, each of the Serapeia on Delos was equipped with a water crypt, as water, and more precisely water representing the Nile, played an important part in the cult of the Egyptian gods.64 An autonomous deity whose sole function was to represent the Nile water, if that is what we have here, would be a unique case. We know of Osiris-Canopus/ Osiris-Hydreios, a form of Osiris linking the god’s body with Nile water, underlining its life-giving properties.65 This specific form of Osiris goes back to the Pharaonic period, but the image, the representation of the god, namely in the form of a (non-functional, solid) Hydria topped with the god’s head and a decorated body with deities and scenes alluding to the myth of Osiris, was probably invented in the first century BCE.66 Other, similar objects representing the Nile water from the Roman period make it evident that the worship of the Nile water in some form or another was not unusual.67 In contrast to these epithets and objects, the unique development on Delos is an actual deification and personification or embodiment of the Nile water in the form of a new deity, Hydreios. This deity in this form is only ever worshipped here and only appears as an entity in the aforementioned four inscriptions (one of which is a double).68 What makes 61 62

63 64

65 67

68

RICIS 202/0206; 0207; 0209 = ID 2617; 2618; 2619 (all dated to 95/94 BCE). On the composition of the associations who dedicated the moneys, and the socio-religious implications, see Steinhauer 2019: 231–34. RICIS 202/0210 = ID 2620–4 (95/96 BCE?) and Siard 2007: 430. On the water crypts in the Delian Serapeia, see Wild 1981: 34–39 as well as Siard 1998; Kleibl 2013. 66 On Osiris-Canopus, see Kettel 1994. Wild 1981: 113–23; Liptay 2019: 2. Siard collects the evidence for the Greek and Roman world and argues for an Egyptian origin of the god and his ‘theology’; Siard 2007: 440–46. Martzavou follows the spread of the worshippers and the cult of the Egyptian gods from Delos to Thessalonia and Euboia, even including allusions to the Nile water, but admits that the god Hydreios is as such only worshipped in Delos; Martzavou 2010: 200. While all dedications were made in the dative, as is usual for votive inscriptions, and therefore a neutral ending (Hydreion) is theoretically possible, the fact that Hydreios is addressed as

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Siard’s argument for a distinct deity particularly convincing is the fact that Hydreios is addressed as epikoos, listening, making it difficult to imagine that the dedications were made to the building as such rather than a divine entity with agency and power.69 The concept of the god who listens was initially transferred to Greece from Egyptian cult practices but becomes a staple formula in dedications of the Hellenistic period in Greece and fits well within this specific context.70 The concept highlights a personal and immanent relationship between worshipper and deity without intermediaries. This personal relationship is nicely illustrated by the thanks-offering dedicated to Hydreios by Spurius Stertinius, a resident Romaios.71 Thanking the god for having granted whatever the worshipper had asked for, be it cure from illness as often associated with the Egyptian gods and water, the fertile or life-giving powers of the Nile water, or otherwise, demonstrates the relationship between worshipper and deity here on Delos.72 Within the Sanctuary of Serapis and Isis, global gods by now well-known to both Greeks and Romans, the multi-ethnic community of worshippers assembled to create or perhaps conceptualise a ‘new’ deity that they felt they needed. What this communal effort created in fact was a unique and local deity that served the needs of all worshippers: an Egyptian man dedicated the pavement of the alleyway leading up to the naos, while the restoration of the building works was paid for by a hugely diverse group of worshippers assembled by an Athenian priest. The dynamic character of the sanctuary allowed not only for gendermixed and ethnically diverse associations of worshippers, but also for a wide variety of sacrificial practices: in her study of the sacrificial pits and altars of Serapeion C, Siard demonstrated that the worshippers were adhering to a variety of animal sacrifices, including the sacrifice of pork associated with Greek sacrifice and rather uncommon in an Egyptian context.73

69

70 71 72 73

epikoos (listening) in two different individual dedications, makes it difficult to imagine that the dedications were made to the building as such: RICIS 202/0323 = ID 2155 (105–103 BCE) ll. 1–3: [Σπόρ]ιο̣ ̣ς Σ ̣ ̣τ ̣ερτίνιος / Σπορίου Ῥωμαῖος Ὑδρέῳ / ἐπηκόωι χαριστήριον; RICIS 202/0344 = ID 2160 (95/94 BCE) Ὑ[δ]ρε ̣ ίῳ ̣ / ἐπηκόῳ, / ἐφ’ ἱερέ[ω]ς Ἀρτεμ[ιδώ]- / ρου, ζακορεύοντος / (5) Εὐόδου. Six dedications on Delos were made to Isis epikoos (RICIS 202/0197 together with Serapis and Anubis and 0198 together with Serapis, Anubis and Harpocrates, 0262, 0361, 0363, 0365). On the transmission of this practice to Greece from Egypt, see Stavrianopoulou 2016: 83–84. On Spurius and his many dedications on Delos, see Steinhauer 2020. On the life-giving quality of Osiris-Hydreios, see Wild 1981: 125. Brun and Leguilloux 2013: 171–72.

Between Local and Global?

Equally, the existence of a large number of holocaust or semiholocaustic sacrifices in the vicinity of the unidentified southern altar (near naos C), especially of fowl, seems to be a practice that goes further back than the Egyptian tradition to the Levant and was uncommon in Greece.74 The worshippers here were able to hold all kinds of sacrifices in a truly global fashion. Perhaps even more striking is the discovery of burned seal prints, displaying a wide variety of symbols, some of which were still attached to the papyri they once protected, a discovery without parallel so far.75 The lack of comparable finds means that it is impossible to say whether the papyri were burned on the altar to fuel the fire or whether they served actual ritual purposes, such as oracular consultations or medical ritual practice associated with the Egyptian deities.76 The excavator argues that it is most likely that the findings point to local healing rituals and dream interpretation in accordance with the remaining evidence from the sanctuary.77 If this is the case, we can trace yet another local development that was, as far as we know, only ever practised in this particular way on Delos. The example of Serapeion C demonstrates that, over a period of about 100 years, the character of the sanctuary and the rituals performed evolved significantly. The global aspect that was represented right from the beginning by the introduction of Serapis and Isis was supplemented with several local anchors that were created and defined by the local communities. One of these anchors was the creation of the god Hydreios, a new deity that offered an immediacy by physically appearing as water, locally. Even more so, it offered immediate help by listening, therewith becoming a stabilising force for the local population in their every-day-lives. A further anchor can be seen in the eclectic assemblage of sacrificial practices going beyond local and Greek sacrificial norms that I have described above. Lastly, the development of divinatory practices that may have included the burning of papyri as a way of communicating with the divine offers a source of reassurance and guidance on a local level that was managed by the sanctuary’s administrative authorities.

74 76 77

75 Ekroth 2018: 315, n. 51. Siard 2010; 2010: 214. For an analysis of the options, see Siard 2010: 218–20. A dream interpreter (oneirokritos) is listed several times in the inscriptions of Serapeion C: ID 2071, ID 2120; ID 2105 (and the double ID 2106); ID 2151 and a female dream interpreter in ID 2619, b, 10. For the healing deities and consultations documented in the sanctuary see Siard 2010: 220.

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Conclusions Local religion as defined by Jack Eller for anthropological studies may only ever have existed in the pre-Homeric Mediterranean, before the notion of what constitutes the Greeks (Hellenes) was defined.78 Yet local religion in a more direct, physical sense, in which the location drove and sustained religious developments, was an important aspect of Greek religion from the Archaic period until the rise of Christianity (and possibly beyond). The example of Delos has shown that Greek religion was mediated between what I have called local, translocal, and global cults, each of which could shape any given local religious ‘landscape’, when seen synchronically. From a diachronic perspective, unlike local and global cults, however, translocal cults were doomed to die out in the long run and did not outlast their local and global counterparts, as we can see in the example of the small ‘oriental’-style sanctuaries and the associations of the Berytian merchants. This is due to the way in which local cults were able to be adapted to cultural changes, as seen in the example of the Kynthion. Global cults, on the other hand, could be anchored in local traditions or simply adapted to local demographics in a creative way, merging with new and traditional practices, as seen with the example of Serapeion C, while keeping signature characteristics. Local and ‘global’ aspects went hand in hand in shaping Greek religion. This combination was crucial for the survival of individual cults within the system in an ever more connected world as it came to face Roman supremacy. No traditional Greek cult was truly global in the sense of a goddess such as Isis. This might be the reason why her local worship outlasted that of all other ‘pagan’ cults and may be seen as the most potent obstacle to Christian efforts.

Bibliography Baslez, M.-F. (1977) Recherches sur les conditions de pénétration et de diffusion des religions orientales à Délos: (IIe–Ier s. avant notre ère). Paris. Beck, H. (2020) Localism and the Ancient Greek City-State. Chicago, Ill. Bricault, L. (1996) ‘Les prêtres du Sarapieion C de Délos’, Bulletin de correspondance hellénique 120(2), 597–616. (2004) ‘La diffusion isiaque: une esquisse’, in P. C. Bol (ed.) Fremdheit-Eigenheit. Ägypten, Griechenland und Rom. Austausch und Verständnis. Munich, 548–56. 78

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(2013) Les cultes isiaques dans le monde Gréco-Romain. Paris. Bricault, L., M. J. Versluys and P. G. P. Meyboom (eds.) (2007) Nile into Tiber: Egypt in the Roman World. Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference of Isis Studies, Leyden, May 11–14 2005. Leiden and Boston, Mass. Brun Kyriakidis, H. (2021). Egyptian Cults and Sanctuaries on Delos. Athens. Brun, H. and M. Leguilloux (2013) ‘Rituels sacrificiels et offrandes animales dans le Sarapieion C de Délos’, in G. Ekroth and J. Wallensten (eds.) Bones, Behaviour and Belief. The Zooarchaeological Evidence as a Source for Ritual Practice in Ancient Greece and Beyond. Athens, 167–79. Bruneau, P. (1963) ‘Isis Pélagia à Délos (Compléments)’, Bulletin de correspondance hellénique 87, 301–08. (1967) ‘Deux noms antiques de pavement: KΑΤΑΚΛΥΣΤΟΝ et ΛΙΘΟΣΤΡΩΤΟΝ’, Bulletin de correspondance hellénique 91, 423–46. (1970) Recherches sur les cultes de Délos à l’époque hellénistique et à l’époque impériale. Paris. (1980) ‘Le dromos et le temple C du Sarapieion C de Délos’, Bulletin de correspondance hellénique 104, 161–88. Bruneau, P. and J. Ducat (1983). Guide de Délos École française d’Athènes. Paris. Constantakopoulou, C. (2007) The Dance of the Islands: Insularity, Networks, the Athenian Empire, and the Aegean World. Oxford. (2017) Aegean Interactions. Delos and its Networks in the Third Century. Oxford. Dignas, B. (2008) ‘Greek Priests of Sarapis?’, in B. Dignas and K. Trampedach (eds.) Practitioners of the Divine. Greek Priests and Religious Officials from Homer to Heliodorus. London, 73–88. Dow, S. (1937) ‘The Egyptian Cults in Athens’, Harvard Theological Review 30(4), 183–232. Dunand, F. (1973) Le culte d’Isis dans le bassin orientale de la Méditerranée. Leiden. Ekroth, G. (2018) ‘Holocaustic Sacrifices in Ancient Greek Religion and the Ritual Relations to the Levant’, in Ł. Niesiołowski-Spanò and M. Węcowski (eds.) Change, Continuity, and Connectivity. North-Eastern Mediterranean at the Turn of the Bronze Age and in the Early Iron Age. Wiesbaden, 308–26. Eller, J. (2015) Cultural Anthropology: 101. London and New York, N.Y. Engelmann, H. (1975) The Delian Aretalogy of Sarapis. Leiden. Fischer, M. (2003) ‘Yavne-Yam (Israel): Archäologie und Geschichte einer Hafenstadt am Mittelmeer’, Antike Welt 34, 241–52. Hadjidakis, P., D. Matarangas and M. Varti-Matarangas (2009) ‘Ancient Quarries in Delos, Greece’, in Y. Maniatis (ed.) ASMOSIA VII. Athens, 273–88. Kettel, J. (1994) ‘Canopes, rḏw.w d’Osiris et Osiris-Canope’, in C. Berger, G. Clerc and N. Grimal (eds.) Hommages à Jean Leclant III. Cairo, 315–30. Kleibl, K. (2013). ‘“Möge dir Osiris frisches Wasser geben” Nilwasser und seine Bedeutung für den Isiskult’, Antike Welt 6, 16–21.

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  Leiwo, M. (1989) ‘Philostratus of Ascalon, His Bank, His Connections and Naples in c. 130–90 B.C.’, Athenaeum 67, 575–84. Liptay, É. (2019) ‘In Search of a Missing Osiris-Hydreios’, CIPEG Journal: Ancient Egyptian & Sudanese Collections and Museum 3, 1–16. MacGillivray, J. A. (1980) ‘Mount Kynthos: The Early Cycladic Settlement’, Bulletin de correspondance hellénique 104, 3–45. Malaise, M. (1972) Les conditions de pénétration et de diffusion des cultes égyptiens en Italie. Leiden. (1984) ‘La diffusion des cultes égyptiens dans les provinces européennes de l’Empire romain’, Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt II.17.3, 1616–91. (2000) ‘Le probléme de l’hellénisation d’Isis’, in L. Bricault (ed.) De Memphis à Rome. Actes du Ier Colloque international sur les études isiaques. PotiersFuturoscope, 8–10 avril 1999. Leiden and Boston, Mass., 1–19. (2007) ‘La diffusion des cultes isiaques: un problem de terminologie et de critique’, in L. Bricault, M. J. Versluys and P. G. P. Meyboom (eds.) Nile into Tiber: Egypt in the Roman World. Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference of Isis Studies, Leiden, May 11–14 2005. Leiden and Boston, Mass., 19–39. Martzavou, P. (2010) ‘Les cultes isiaques et les Italiens entre Délos, Thessalonique et l’Eubée’, Pallas 84, 181–205. Matricon-Thomas, E. (2012) ‘Le culte d’Isis à Athènes: entre aspect “universel” et spécificités locales’, in L. Bricault and M. J. Versluys (eds.) Egyptian Gods in the Hellenistic and Roman Mediterranean: Image and Reality between Local and Global. Palermo, 41–66. Moyer, I. (2011) The Limits of Hellenisation. Cambridge. Nielsen, I. (2015) ‘The Architectural Context of Religious Groups on Delos’, Eretz-Israel: Archaeological, Historical and Geographical Studies / ‫ מחקרים בידיעת הארץ ועתיקותיה‬:‫ישראל‬-‫ ארץ‬33, 141–53. Picard, C. (1920) ‘Fouilles de Délos (1910). Observations sur la société des Poseidoniastes de Bérytos et sur son histoire’, Bulletin de correspondance hellénique 44, 263–311. (1921) L’établissement des Poseidoniastes de Bérytos (Exploration archéologique de Délos faite par l’École française d’Athènes, fascicule VI). Paris. Plassart, A. (1928) Les sanctuaires et les cultes du Mont Cynthe (Exploration Archéologique de Délos, faite par l’École française d’Athènes, fascicule XI). Paris. Reger, G. (1993) ‘The Public Purchase of Grain on Independent Delos’, Classical Antiquity 12, 300–34. Sfameni Gasparro, G. (2007) ‘The Hellenistic Face of Isis: Cosmic and Saviour Goddess’, in L. Bricault, M. J. Versluys and P. G. P. Meyboom (eds.) Nile into Tiber: Egypt in the Roman World. Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference of Isis Studies, Leyden, May 11–14 2005. Leiden and Boston, Mass., 40–72. Siard, H. (1998) ‘La crypte du Sarapeion A de Délos et le procès d’Apollônios’, Bulletin de correspondance hellénique 122, 469–89. (2007) ‘L’Hydreion du Sarapieion C de Délos: la divinisation de l’eau dans un sanctuaire isiaque’, in L. Bricault, M. J. Versluys and P. G. P. Meyboom

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(eds.) Nile into Tiber: Egypt in the Roman World. Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference of Isis Studies, Leyden, May 11–14 2005. Leiden and Boston, Mass., 415–47. (2008) ‘L’analyse d’un rituel sacrificiel dans le Sarapieion C de Délos’, in V. Mehl and P. Brulé (eds.) Le sacrifice antique: vestiges, procédures et stratégies. Rennes, 27–38. (2010) ‘Les sceaux du Sarapieion C de Délos’, Bulletin de correspondance hellénique 134(1), 195–221. Stavrianopoulou, E. (2016) ‘From the God Who Listened to the God Who Replied: Transformations in the Concept of Epekoos’, in C. Bonnet, V. Pirenne‑Delforge and G. Pironti (eds.) Dieux des Grecs, dieux des Romains. Panthéons en dialogue à travers l’histoire et l’historiographie. Rome, 79–97. Steinhauer, J. (2014) Religious Associations in the Post-Classical Polis. Stuttgart. (2019) ‘Socio-Religious Networks of “Foreign” Women in Hellenistic Delos and Beyond’, in M. Dana and I. Savalli-Lestrade (eds.) La cité interconnectée. Bordeaux, 223–37. (2020) ‘Religious Practice and the Delian Neighbourhoods’, Religion in the Roman Empire 6, 138–158. (forthcoming) ‘Foreign Women and Their Lived Experience in Hellenistic Greece: The Sanctuary of the Syrian Deities on Delos (166–88 BCE)’, in G. Woolf et al. (eds.) Sanctuaries and Experience. Knowledge, Practice and Space in the Ancient World. Cambridge. Trümper, M. (2002) ‘Das Sanktuarium des “Établissement des Poseidoniastes de Bérytos” in Delos. Zur Baugeschichte eines griechischen Vereinsheiligtums’, Bulletin de correspondance hellénique 126, 265–330. Vallois, R. (1944) L’architecture hellénique et hellénistique à Délos jusqu’à l’éviction des Déliens (166 av. J.-C.). Paris. Versluys, M. J. (2015) ‘Roman Visual Material Culture as Globalising Koine’, in M. Pitts and M. J. Versluys (eds.) Globalisation and the Roman World. World History, Connectivity and Material Culture. Cambridge and New York, N.Y., 141–74. Wild, R. A. (1981) Water in the Cultic Worship of Isis and Sarapis. Leiden. Woolf, G. (2014) ‘Isis and the Evolution of Religions’, in L. Bricault and M. J. Versluys (eds.) Power, Politics, and the Cults of Isis. Proceedings of the Vth International Conference of Isis Studies, Boulogne-sur-Mer, November 27–29, 2008. Leiden and Boston, Mass., 62–92. (2017) ‘Empires, Diasporas and the Emergence of Religions’, in J. Carleton Paget and J. Lieu (eds.) Christianity in the Second Century. Themes and Developments. Cambridge, 25–38. (2018–19) ‘Global Deities: Gods on the Move in the Ancient Mediterranean World’, BANDUE Revista de la Sociedad Española de Ciencias de las Religiones / Journal of the Spanish Association for the Sciences of Religions 11, 111–28.

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Personal or Communal? Social Horizons of Local Greek Religion  

This chapter turns to the social matrix of the local. Beyond spatial connotations, local communities are aggregations of people first and foremost who cultivate a particular identity of place. Since Greek communities typically included people from other locations, the social texture of the local was subject to varying degrees of cultural diversity. In the field of religion, corresponding negotiations between individual and communal practices were complicated by charged perceptions of what constituted the social core of the local, that is, who was part of it – and who was not. Following up on the topics of foreign presence in the local and the impact of long-distance sea travel, Irene Polinskaya disentangles the threads of personal and communal agency. She begins her discussion with examples that attest to cultic initiatives undertaken by individual citizens and foreign residents. Beyond wellknown practices of turning private endeavours into communal ones, for instance by decree of the polis, Polinskaya unravels more hidden, nonlinear processes of communal opting in and staying in; that is, she traces the ways in which personal agency gradually inspired and received communal resonance and meaning. Corresponding case-studies include, among others, the introduction of Pan’s cult and the shrine at the Vari cave in Attica, Xenophon’s depiction of the Sanctuary of Artemis in Skillous, and also a curious example from ethno-archaeology: the discussion of prophetic dreams and epiphanies experienced by individuals on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Naxos, and the ways in which these people struggled to have their prophecies validated. The chapter concludes that the local horizon, while principally well positioned to incorporate individual religious experiences into the community, was subject to dynamics and determinants that rendered its social and spatial permutations somewhat unpredictable.

Inheriting and ‘Opting In’: Ancestral Cults and New Introductions

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All ancient Greek communities possessed what they called ‘ancestral’ cults, which often were at the core of local religious systems. Maintenance of

Personal or Communal?

such cults, that is, provision of what was due to the gods and heroes (τὰ πρὸς τοὺς θεούς),1 was an inherited responsibility, understood to be incumbent upon the community as a whole,2 as no single individual could meet the varied requirements of serving all gods and heroes of the land: distinctions of age, gender, and social status often regulated who could provide a specific divine service in a given cult.3 The inherited aspect of this collective communal responsibility towards the gods is encapsulated in the notions of τὰ πάτρια or πάτριος νόμος/πάτρια νόμιμα, as well as ‘πατρῷοι gods and heroes’.4 New cults and new divine dues could be added to a list of communal responsibilities, but old ones were not supposed to be forgotten. Origins of ancestral cults and mechanisms of their introduction are often obscured by aetiological mists for us, but we get some insight into those processes from historical introductions of new cults. When we have that information preserved, it almost invariably presents introduction of new cults as private initiative. This paper looks into the interdependence of personal and communal in the functioning of Greek religion at local level. At the disposal of ancient Greek communities, there were some known means for translating a personal religious initiative into communal cult, for example, a vote in the public assembly (introductions of Pan and Asklepios in Athens), but a less formal process of communal ‘opting in’ can also be observed in operation and requires further attention. This process would often unfold less conspicuously and more gradually, with individuals choosing, one by one and in their own time, to worship in a newly outlined 1

2

3

4

Typical expressions include: ἐπιμέλεια (‘care’) usually in conjunction with expressions πρὸς τοὺς θεοὺς (D. 22.78) or περὶ τοὺς θεοὺς (Arist. Pol. 6, 1322b 18), and sometimes θεραπεῖα (Pl. Resp. 4.274b). The expression τὰ πρὸς τοὺς θεούς appears in the fourth century BCE (IG II2 1222, line 7, late fourth century BCE) and becomes common in honorific decrees of the Hellenistic period. It is attested in Attica at least 22 times, e.g. IG II2 764, fr. a1, lines 17–18 (ca. 277/276? BCE). Honours (timai) and care (epimeleia) are due to divinity by nature (Arist. Eth. Eud. 7.1242b.20), and should be the greatest (Arist. Eth. Nic. 4.3; Bekker p. 1123b 18). Further discussion in Segev 2017 and reviews. It was an indispensable duty of members of a given community, alongside other public duties, to deliver what is due to the gods: Arist. Pol. 6, 1322b 130 αἱ μὲν οὖν ἀναγκαῖαι ἐπιμέλειαί εἰσι . . . περί τε τὰ δαιμόνια . . . . Cf. Pl. Resp. 4.274b. Evidence of collective responsibility can be found in some Attic sacrificial calendars, e.g. that of the Marathonian Tetrapolis, as convincingly shown by Lambert 2018. E.g. only married women could conduct certain ceremonies in specific cults of Demeter (Isae. 3.80); cf. women’s choruses for Damia and Auxesia on Aigina (Hdt. 5.83.3). A clear distribution of roles is evident in various cultic processions, such as the Panathenaia in Athens, or that in honour of Zeus Sosipolis, Artemis Leukophryene, and Apollo Pythios in Magnesia on the Maeander (McCabe, Magnesia 2 (= I. Magnesia 98, Syll.2 553, Syll.3 589, LSAM 32, 15:667). See discussion in Parker 2011: 198. A recent survey by Mikalson (2016: 110–17) is very useful and includes consideration of πάτριοι νόμοι and ψηφίσματα alongside customs termed τὰ πάτρια. Τὰ πάτρια was an international concept, operative in intra-state and inter-state religious matters (Thuc. 5.18.2).

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precinct with acts of private dedications or by joining in a sacrifice and feast. Conversely, for the founder of any new cult, there was a concern for ensuring the cult’s longevity, linked to the understanding that success of a personal initiative would be dependent on the communal response, their perception of the deity’s or hero’s benefit for themselves and their willingness to take upon themselves the responsibility for providing the deity with honours. In what follows, I explore the processes of ‘opting in’ and ‘staying in’ as key to the endurance of local cultic worship. To demonstrate the crucial interplay of personal initiative and communal response in religious life at local level in ancient Greece, I adduce both some well-known ancient cases and an example from ethno-archaeology.

Private Foundations in Public Places: The Initiative of Citizens Xenokrateia of Athens Sets Up a Shrine of Kephisos It is not accidental or incidental that private foundations include as a matter of course an invitation to others to use the shrine for worship. Xenokrateia, a woman from Cholleidai, founded a shrine (ἱερὸν ἱδρύσατο), ca. 400 BCE, for River Kephisos and for ‘deities who share the altar’ near the river’s mouth in what is now the area of Nea Phaleron in Athens. Xenokrateia’s foundation inscription includes the clause: θύεν τῶι βουλομένωι ἐπὶ / τελεστῶν ἀγαθῶν ‘whoever wishes may sacrifice [or “is urged to do so”, if the infinitive has imperative force] for good outcomes’.5 The shrine may have not had any architectural enhancements beyond being set in a natural grove, but must have contained altars. While Kephisos may have been the focus of Xenokrateia’s religious gesture, her shrine was from the start open to ξύμβωμοι θεοί, some of whom might have been named in another inscription made by a different person but found in the same area: Hestia, Apollo Pythios, Leto, Artemis Lochia Ileithyia, Acheloios, Kallirhoe, Geraistai Nymphai Genethliai, Rhapsos.6 In the same area, another man with a tell-tale name, Kephisodotos, dedicated an inscribed relief for Hermes and the Nymphs, asserting that he also set up an altar, while a later inscribed relief carved on the back of Kephisodotos’ relief names the deities honoured as Hermes, Echelos, Iasile.7 The presence 5 6

7

IG I3 987, lines 6–7. IG II2 4547; it is hard to tell whether Ileithyia is another cultic epiclesis of Artemis Lochia or a separate deity here, as both are possible. IG I3 986A; IG I3 986B.

Personal or Communal?

of dedications and additional foundations, apparently subsequent to those made by the cult founder and perhaps addressed to different deities, shows that the shrine achieved its public status. People, presumably from surrounding areas, accepted the designation of the chosen spot as sacred to Kephisos and ‘opted in’. Whether the cult(s) was adopted officially on the payroll of any local deme and/or whether it was included in a sacrificial calendar of that deme is unknown. Similarly, a certain Pantalkes who set up or embellished a cave shrine (ἀνέθεκε . . . τόδ’ ἔργον) near Pharsalos in Thessaly testifies in another inscription at the cave’s entrance that his work was in gratitude to the gods for various benefits that had accrued to him personally, but his inscription goes beyond his personal circumstances and invites others to worship at the shrine: ἀναβαίνετ[ε], θύετε Πανί, ̣ / εὔχεσθε, εὐφραίνεσθε (‘ascend, sacrifice to Pan, pray, celebrate’).8 And the presence of many gifts (ἔμφυτα καὶ πίνακες καὶ ἀγάλματα δῶρά τε πολλ[ά]) testifies to the fact that the shrine was indeed used by many.9 These examples show that a deity or a hero/-ine that was not envisioned as living on a person’s estate as a household divinity but as living in the public domain (in the community’s land that was jointly held in possession by all its gods and heroes), such a deity could not be monopolised by anyone for personal veneration.10 Whatever one’s personal motivation (e.g. inspiration, gratitude) to honour a divinity, the latter would be viewed as free and willing to benefit others as well. As an alternative to honouring a deity with a gift in an existing sanctuary, one could create a new sanctuary and open it up for the use of other worshippers. This is the basis for Xenokrateia’s invitation to others. Whatever her personal reasons for being thankful to Kephisos, Xenokrateia could not appropriate a river or expect that the deity’s favours could be limited to her alone.11 A private foundation beyond one’s own estate, while a deeply personal religious gesture, could only be instituted as a public sanctuary. Conversely, such a private foundation could last only if others in the community opted in, convinced of the deity’s benefit to themselves.

8

9 10

11

Pantalkes’ cave shrine as ‘a dedicated work’: I Thess. 72. Cave entrance inscription: I Thess. 73, citation lines 19–20. Line 8; I. Thess. I 73, with useful discussion in Purvis 2003: 16–17. On the expression ‘gods and heroes who hold this land’ (Thuc. 2.74.2) and parallels, see Polinskaya 2012 and 2013: 37–42, with bibliography. Purvis 2003: 15 notes: ‘The location of the shrine is not Xenokratia’s home deme, but the River Cephisus and its tributaries flow through that deme as well as many others, emptying into the sea at Phaleron.’

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Introduction of the Cult of Pan to Attica This is an apt example for our discussion because here we confront a personal religious experience (a divine epiphany witnessed by one person) which, however, concerns the public interests of his community. In 490 BCE, Herodotus tells us, the Arkadian god Pan suggested to the Athenians to introduce his cult to Athens.12 He did so through a messenger – a longdistance runner Pheidippides – while the latter was passing through Arkadia on his run to Sparta. There are several important details here worth our attention: first is that the introduction of Pan’s worship (epimeleia) to Attica, not just the foundation of a new sanctuary, was at stake. What is also clear is that the Athenians had been aware of Pan’s existence, yet were not paying him respects (οὐδεμίαν ἐπιμελείην ποιεῦντες). He was not one of their ancestral gods, so why should they? To that Pan had a telling answer: a reminder of the past and promise of future benefits for the community – ‘he had been and will be in the future useful (χρήσιμος) to Athenians.’ The god provides the reason for his own worship. The second detail is that the personal experience of Pheidippides, that is Pan’s epiphany to him, does not automatically translate into acceptance of the god’s rebuke for neglecting him. Rather there is a presumed deliberation hidden behind καὶ ταῦτα μὲν Ἀθηναῖοι . . . πιστεύσαντες εἶναι ἀληθέα: there is a question whether to believe, be it Pheidippides’ report or Pan’s claims of being useful to the Athenians. Remarkable also is the lack of urgency compatible with the notion of deliberation – the Athenians took their time and when things settled down (καταστάντων σφι εὖ ἤδη τῶν πραγμάτων) they founded a shrine for Pan below the Acropolis and instituted sacrifices and a torch race. The Athenian community had to be actively involved in opting in, deciding to accept the private experience of one of their members as relevant to the whole community and weighing up its possible debt to the god and the promise of future benefits before endorsing the translation of personal experience into public cult.

Failed Cult Introduction – Kleisthenes Introduces Melanippos to Sikyon An apparent failure of cult introduction when the founder neglects the importance of bringing the community on board is illustrated by the case of Kleisthenes of Sikyon and his attempt to replace the worship of hero 12

Hdt. 6.105.

Personal or Communal?

Adrastos with that of Melanippos. Herodotus cites the story as a clear example of a tyrant’s hybris, but several telling details give us insights into the mechanisms of cult introduction and the role of individuals and community in them.13 Kleisthenes, having failed in his plan to throw Adrastos out of Sikyon because Delphic Apollo forbade him, devised instead a scheme to deprive Adrastos of his honours by introducing to Sikyon a cult of another hero who was in myths Adrastos’ enemy – Melanippos of Thebes. Kleisthenes set up a temenos for Melanippos in the prytaneion of Sikyon and transferred to him the sacrifices previously offered to Adrastos, while at the same time transferring Adrastos’ tragic choruses to Dionysos. The reaction of the Sikyonians to this private initiative is given in oblique ways, first, through the comment about the great honours Sikyonians used to pay Adrastos (οἱ δὲ Σικυώνιοι ἐώθεσαν μεγαλοστὶ κάρτα τιμᾶν τὸν Ἄδρηστον), and through the assertion that the herōon of Adrastos ‘had been and still is’ (in the time of Herodotus) in the agora of the Sikyonians: τοῦτο δέ, ἡρώιον γὰρ ἦν καὶ ἔστι ἐν αὐτῇ τῇ ἀγορῇ τῶν Σικυωνίων Ἀδρήστου τοῦ Ταλαοῦ.14 Since Herodotus does not say that the worship of Adrastos is in abeyance, the mention of the herōon as ‘still is’ could imply that the cult was active. This would suggest the restoration or at least endurance of Adrastos’ cult through the Archaic and Classical periods, despite the actions of one individual (be they historically accurate or legendary).15 The finale of the story is the reversal of Kleisthenes’ policy on new tribal names, which Sikyonians eventually replaced with the names of three Doric tribes, with the fourth tribe given the name of Adrastos’ son Aigialeos. The logic of the story would suggest that Adrastos probably regained his honours and was possibly further reimbursed for decades of neglect with an amplification of his local standing in kinship terms. Pausanias, a late source on the cultic topography of Sikyon, makes no mention of Melanippos, nor does he mention a herōon of Adrastos, but the latter figures in the local genealogy as one of the Sikyonian kings and in cultic topography as the founder of a sanctuary of Hera, and of altars to Pan and Helios.16

13 15

16

14 Hdt. 5.67–68. Hdt. 5.67.1. The probable restoration, however, either did not involve the tragic choruses that seem to have stayed with Dionysos (Paus. 2.7.5), or this element of Herodotus’ story should not be viewed as historical, but rather as an aition of Dionysos’ choruses at Sikyon, that is, as a story used to explain a religious custom already in existence by means of a flashback to myth-history. Paus. 2.6.6; 2.11.1–2.

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Herodotus’ story suggests that there was no great enthusiasm for the introduction of Melanippos to Sikyon, and rather likely there would have been resistance to the private initiative of a tyrant. The fact that we do not hear about the worship of Melanippos in Sikyon ever again in our sources would suggest that this hero, despite allegedly being inserted into the very centre of the local religious landscape, did not achieve a lasting presence. The community may have paid lip service to the tyrant’s demands for a time, but the community did not genuinely opt into the service of Melanippos. Once again, the importance of communal acceptance of a new cult is demonstrated here. An adherence to a new cult could not be forced or imposed, at least, not easily in the Archaic and Classical periods, unless the community was willing to opt in, seeing personal and collective benefits in it.

Private Foundations in Public Places: The Initiative of Foreign Residents From exploring the cases of personal religious initiative leading to the foundation of new sanctuaries by community members in their home territories, we move to the cases of private religious foundations by nonnatives.17 The reason for addressing such initiatives separately is because the status of foreign residents in a Greek community freed their holders from the burden of ancestral responsibility towards local gods, while at the same time probably encumbering metics’ ability to access fully the benefits of divine patronage in their host communities. The examples that follow nevertheless demonstrate the same necessity of social, that is communal, engagement with the private foundation for the latter to achieve a true ‘local’ status. Presence in some location alone is not enough for a private shrine to become the centre of a local cult, others in the community have to be compelled to take such a cult on board.

Archedamos of Thera and the Shrine at the Vari Cave The shrine elaborately carved out of bedrock in a cave at Vari by Archedamos of Thera was in the territory of the Attic deme Anagyrous (Ἀναγυροῦς), of the tribe Erechtheis. Pausanias only mentions Anagyrous 17

Not discussed in this chapter, but also relevant are the cases of Artemidoros of Perge (see Purvis 2003: 54–55; Graf 2013: 127–30), Philios of Cyprus and others (a survey in Purvis 2003: 56–60).

Personal or Communal?

as a place with a Sanctuary of the Mother (Ἀναγυρασίοις δὲ Μητρὸς ἱερόν), recently identified.18 We do not have a sacrificial calendar of the deme and know hardly anything about its religious life. As a result, it is difficult to assess the place of the Vari cave in the cultic topography and the role of the cults associated with the cave in the local religion of Anagyrous.19 Epigraphic and iconographic evidence from the cave suggests the worship of the Nymphs, Pan, Charis, Apollo Hersos (or Apollo and Hersos) and probably Kybele, but it is not at all certain that ‘[t]he shrine had already a tradition when Archedamos took it over’.20 The inscriptions pertaining to Archedamos are dated ca. 425? BCE and associate his name only with the Nymphs: he planted a garden and built a dancefloor for them, and worked the cave, on their instructions.21 If the dedication of hο / Σκύρονος / ΗΑΙΠΟΛΟΣ is earlier than the inscriptions of Archedamos, it would indeed suggest that the cave had been already known in the neighbourhood and associated with the Nymphs before Archedamos.22 If so, it may have been a locus of private dedications without regular rites (such as sacrifice, choral dance, and similar). The private efforts of metic Archedamos apparently resident in the deme of Anagyrous may have made the religious significance of the cave more visible and prominent, attracting other worshippers and perhaps enabling the broadening of the circle of divinities worshipped. Something similar probably happened at Xenokrateia’s shrine in Nea Phaleron. The transition of the Vari cave from the status of an auspicious place to that of a public shrine is evident from another inscription, showing that the cave sanctuary was becoming a matter of more than individual concern in the fifth century BCE: τἄντερ’ ἔχ- / σο κλύζετ[ε] / καὶ τὸν ὄν- / θον νίζε̣ τε, ̣ 23 ‘Wash the entrails outside and wash off the dung.’ This minor sacred regulation, whether clarifying rules for pre-existing practice or attesting the introduction of sacrifices, would fit neatly into the narrative of

18 19

20

21

22

Paus. 1.31.1; Papadopoulou 2018: 109, fig. 88. It is unclear whether there was a connection with the site of Lathouriza: suggested by Steinhauer 1994: 184. Graf (2013: 126–27) says that the cultic use of the cave begins in the late sixth century (not clear what evidence he relies on), yet Purvis (2003: 49) notes that pottery and clay figurines begin only ca. 460 BCE. It would seem that a dedication to the Nymphs (IG I3 974), dated on the basis of letterforms to 450–425? BCE, was used by Graf to suggest an evolution from a pre-existing shrine to Archedamos’ elaboration, but letterforms are notoriously unreliable indicators of date, so we would do well to be cautious. IG I3 977, sides A and B, probably carved by Archedamos himself, and IG I3 980, apparently cut by someone else. 23 IG I3 974. IG I3 982, transl. Graf.

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Archedamos’ personal contribution to the cult’s development if it postdated Archedamos’ inscriptions, but that is not certain (IG gives a wide date of 450–400 BCE?).24 Even if Archedamos was not the first to recognise the cave’s association with the Nymphs, it was apparently his material involvement (shaping the cave – τ’ἄντρον ἐξηργάξατο) that helped to transform a locus of private dedications into a structured cultic space.25 Thus, in this case as well, a private religious experience (nympholepsy) impacted the development of a public cult.26 After Archedamos’ intervention, the evidence for worship at the Vari cave continues into the fourth and third centuries BCE, as attested by inscribed votive reliefs and other material offerings.27 Notable in Archedamos’ project is the fact of his self-advertisement: he does not shy away from taking credit for his work, but it is not all vanity. His audience is divine as much as it is human. His inscriptions are personal gestures: they seek to attract the divinities’ attention to his own persona and to highlight his efforts to venerate them. They are part of his personal dialogue with the Nymphs. Yet there is another detail in the inscriptions that has led to much debate: his self-identification as a Theraean. This identification has raised questions about Archedamos’ eligibility for shaping a cultic cave in the Attic countryside: ‘as a metic in Athens, he could not own land. He thus had to rely on the friendship or indulgence of an Athenian citizen who would let him work on his land or buy land for the use of the metic’.28 This might have not been an issue, however, if the cave was located in a kind of common land, so that purchase of land in that area would not have been necessary.29 In addition, since it was an underground cave with difficult access, not suitable for sheltering flocks, any claims about its productive and monetary value would have been tenuous. Furthermore, as it apparently contained a spring, the cave’s ownership by the Nymphs would be an a priori assumption, and private ownership by some demesman of Anagyrous would not likely come into play at all. These considerations suggest that a cave containing a spring would have been

24

25 27 29

Graf (2013: 126) comments: ‘whereas the slaughtering and preparation of the sacrificial animals had to take place outside the cave, the meat must have been burnt on the altars or placed before the images inside the cave.’ 26 IG I3 980, lines 4–5. IG I3 980, lines 2–3; on nympholepsy, see Connor 1988. 28 Weller et al. 1903; Schörner and Goette 2004; Graf 2013: 126, n. 27. Graf 2013: 127. So Purvis 2003: 32. The land on the margins of productive land, the so-called eschatiai, were often common grazing areas used by goatherds and shepherds of a given deme or district, or could even be methoria land in common use between neighbouring communities: see e.g. Casevitz 1995; Jameson 2002.

Personal or Communal?

recognised upon its initial discovery by the locals as a natural space inhabited by divinities and therefore the rightful possession of those divinities. Such land would not and could not be purchased. Archedamos’ self-identification as Theraios was therefore not likely aimed at signalling his foreign status (and questionable rights) in Attica, but rather perhaps at explaining his particular devotion to the Nymphs. As Purvis rightly noted, nymphs occupied a special place in Theraean religious mesocosm: each Dorian tribe had their own Nymphs, and so Archedamos’ devotion to the Nymphs of Vari might be a reflection of his cultural background as well as of his personal experience connected to the Attic cave.30 First by naming himself, then by identifying himself as a man of Thera, and finally by calling himself nympholēptos, Archedamos gives us a personal story of his involvement with the cult cave at Vari. Of interest to the present study is the fact that all these personal details play out in a public space: Archedamos has no other choice. As we said about Xenokrateia’s shrine dedicated to Kephisos: a deity that was not residing in your own household could not be appropriated and monopolised, no matter how intense your personal interaction with that deity. How much more so if a deity was in addition associated with a feature of the landscape, such as a river or a cave. Yet it often took private initiative to transform a natural tract of landscape into a shrine, and in such cases personal effort could be the impetus that brought a deity to the attention of other community members and sometimes convinced them to opt into its worship for a long run. As Fritz Graf notes: ‘It does not come as a surprise, then, that the sanctuary went on to flourish well after Archedamos’ intervention: his work resonated with the worshippers for three more centuries.’31

Xenophon’s Sanctuary of Artemis at Skillous As we turn to the discussion of Xenophon’s personal religious gesture in founding a sanctuary of Artemis at Skillous, we have to begin with determining his status in that community. Unlike in the case of Archedamos, here it really matters. In my view, the balance of evidence supports the hypothesis that Xenophon became a citizen of Skillous,32 and as such acquired the right to buy land in that territory, which he dedicated to Artemis. That possibility is strongly suggested by the choice of verbs 30

Purvis 2003: 32–33.

31

Graf 2013: 126.

32

Xen. An. 5.3.12.

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κατοικέω and οἰκίζω describing how Xenophon came to reside at Skillous (κατοικοῦντος ἤδη αὐτοῦ ἐν Σκιλλοῦντι ὑπὸ τῶν Λακεδαιμονίων οἰκισθέντος) – he was a resident in Skillous having been planted as a settler by the Spartans.33 The Spartans are doing the ‘settling’, which suggests that they were in control of the territory in question, at least at the time. Comparable situations and the usage of the same verbs in Thucydides support this view: the episodes involve Spartans giving Thyrea to Aiginetans to settle, and Athenians settling Messenian rebels in Naupaktos. In each case, it seems that the right to own land or at least to use it legally for the duration of the existing arrangements of settlement is either explicitly or implicitly indicated.34 Xenophon may have been granted a kleros by the Spartans in the perioikic land that they had confiscated from the defeated Elis, or he was granted citizenship by the ‘liberated’ Skillountians or Triphylians as a favour to or under some pressure from Sparta, and was made a proxenos of Sparta to boot.35 Xenophon’s turn of phrase, οἵ τε Ξενοφῶντος παῖδες καὶ οἱ ἄλλων πολιτῶν, also supports the notion that he counted himself among politai. Finally, there is the fact, often overlooked in the discussions of Xenophon’s religious project, of him buying (ὠνεῖται) a piece of land for the sanctuary. This plot of land (χωρίον) that he bought was not necessarily the same as where his own oikos was located; the two were not necessarily even adjacent: we only learn that the χωρίον was in the territory of Skillous (ἐν δὲ τῷ ἐν Σκιλλοῦντι χωρίῳ). The land where Xenophon and his household were settled was presumably apportioned to him when he was accepted into the community of citizens, that is, he did not buy the land

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Xen. An. 5.3.7. We learn from Thucydides (2.27.2) that Spartans gave the area of Thyrea to exiled Aiginetans ‘to inhabit and deal out the land among themselves’ (ἐκπεσοῦσι δὲ τοῖς Αἰγινήταις οἱ Λακεδαιμόνιοι ἔδοσαν Θυρέαν οἰκεῖν καὶ τὴν γῆν νέμεσθαι). Thucydides tells us that the area of Thyrea was located on the border between the Argolid and Laconia (ἡ δὲ Θυρεᾶτις γῆ μεθορία τῆς Ἀργείας καὶ Λακωνικῆς ἐστίν), although he does not say anything about its political status, but neither does he challenge that it was not Laconian for the giving. What Thucydides tells us about Athenians settling the Messenian rebels from Ithome at Naupaktos supports the notion that a state could settle a group of people or an individual only in the territory under their control: ἐξῆλθον δὲ αὐτοὶ καὶ παῖδες καὶ γυναῖκες, καὶ αὐτοὺς οἱ Ἀθηναῖοι δεξάμενοι κατ’ ἔχθος ἤδη τὸ Λακεδαιμονίων ἐς Ναύπακτον κατῴκισαν, ἡν ἔτυχον ᾑρηκότες νεωστὶ Λοκρῶν τῶν Ὀζολῶν ἐχόντων (Thuc. 1.101.3) – Athenians ‘settled’ ‘those on Ithome’ (1.103.1) in Naupaktos, ‘which they recently happened to seize from those who possess Ozolian Lokroi’. Confiscation from Elis, Purvis 2003: 80. See also Nielsen 2004, s.v. Skillous, 545–6, who seems sympathetic to the idea that Xenophon was a citizen of Skillous. It is in that capacity he would have been able to serve as Sparta’s proxenos, in which case an unspecific reference in Diog. Laert. 2.51 could be attached to Skillous.

Personal or Communal?

on which his house stood, whereas the land for the Sanctuary of Artemis was his private acquisition, to which he must have been entitled by right of citizenship. We cannot tell whether the land where Xenophon’s house stood was originally the land that had belonged to the Eleians and was theirs for retaking (so argued Eleians in 371 BCE), or was the land of the Skillountians, an independent polis in a Triphylian and later Arkadian federation, or yet again, was part of the land appropriated by the Spartans and retained by them for giving to their chosen settlers.36 We also do not know who the previous owners of the chorion that Xenophon purchased for Artemis had been and whether the status of that land was in any way different from that on which he himself lived. The act of purchasing is, however, significant. Aside from possibly confirming Xenophon’s political status at Skillous, it also separates the legality of his presence in Skillous from the legitimacy of Artemis’ right to her sanctuary. If Xenophon’s land had been taken from others on dubious grounds and might thus be reclaimed, Artemis’ land was presumably legally purchased from a bona fide owner and would remain hers.37 In what follows I focus on the elements that demonstrate the social conditioning of Xenophon’s personal religious gesture. This gesture was in fulfilment of a vow, which no doubt was for Xenophon a serious religious matter, as were all matters of interaction with the gods. It is clear, however, that his obligation towards Artemis Ephesia could have been fulfilled in a number of ways and did not have to take the form of a new cultic foundation: Xenophon’s instructions to Megabyzus were, in case something bad happened to him, to use the money left with him as a safe deposit for a dedication (ἀναθεῖναι) ‘that would be pleasing to the goddess’.38 In other words, an impressive dedication in the existing sanctuary of the goddess at Ephesos would have done. Therefore, leaving secular motivations out of the discussion, we still have to explain the act of founding a

36

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38

On Skillous as an independent polis in a Triphylian or Arkadian federation, see Nielsen 2004: 545–46. Cf. Badian (2004: 45) who argues that Xenophon’s arbitrator in the questions of legitimacy would have been Elis, and that Xenophon would not have been so naïve as to assume ‘that the area and temple he had consecrated to Artemis would not be confiscated and the festival he had instituted would continue to be celebrated . . . Elis had never recognized Sparta’s claim to the territory or, a fortiori, Xenophon’s: hence any arrangements he had made were, in the city’s eyes, null and void and the land and temple had never been consecrated; or even if the temple was allowed to stand, the rich land attached to it might well be turned to the city’s use’. Badian’s date for Xenophon’s account of his residency at Skillous is after 364 BCE, while Nielsen (2004: 545–46) concludes that nothing is heard about Skillous in our sources after 371. Xen. An. 5.3.6: ὅ τι οἴοιτο χαριεῖσθαι τῇ θεῷ.

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new sanctuary instead of making a dedication in an existing one.39 Arguably, building a sanctuary is a grander form of honouring a deity than a dedication in an existing one, and Xenophon may have been looking for a gesture that would match his gratitude to the goddess (whatever it was for: success of his anabasis, personal safety, etc.). Also, there may have been a difficulty of finding a sanctuary of the Ephesian Artemis in Peloponnese, and which other Artemis sanctuary to choose for a dedication may not have been so obvious. If Xenophon chose to make a dedication in an existing sanctuary, his gesture would have remained private and personal, having a minimal impact on the local community (perhaps just a splash of gossip if the dedication were particularly flashy), but his decision to found a sanctuary, while a fitting means of honouring Artemis Ephesia, could not be implemented in any other way but through the involvement of the local community. A founder of any kind implicitly hopes that their project would outlive them.40 With religious foundations, a founder’s hope about the cult’s continuity and longevity inevitably rests on convincing others, beyond one’s family or oikos, to opt in. The first step in the transformation of a private foundation into a public cult is to initiate a process of give and take between the deity and worshippers. If Xenophon brought Skillountians and other πρόσχωροι into a relationship of charis with his Artemis, he could hope for the cult’s survival beyond his days. Acceptance of an invitation to a festival of Artemis would indebt participants to the goddess for the provision of foodstuffs and would generate a sense of obligation to return favours: perform sacrifices, maintain the temple. The greater the number of those drawn into the relationship of reciprocity with the goddess, the greater the likelihood that a few if not all of those would continue to maintain it into the future. Appreciating this mechanism, Xenophon took steps to make sure his Artemis was accepted by being seen as relevant and beneficial to the local community: he presented Artemis as a benefactor of her worshippers. For instance, in the foundation inscription, he does not say that he provided for

39

40

Graf (2013: 123) observes that individuals who initiate public cults are driven to ‘enhance their status in two ways – through their role as owners of a shrine that formed the centre of a neighbourhood group, and through the resonance with a powerful model . . . or with longstanding religious traditions’. Lambert (2018: 160 and n. 34) also focuses on this aspect: ‘as well as pleasing to the gods, it is clear from Xenophon’s own words that this action was intended also to curry favour with the human population’. Graf (2013: 120) notes that a sacred regulation for the maintenance of Xenophon’s shrine ‘makes it clear that he envisioned the cult to outlast him’.

Personal or Communal?

the banquets of the worshippers, rather that the goddess herself did – she is portrayed as the source of all bounty – meat, bread, and wine (παρεῖχε δὲ ὁ θεός σκηνοῦσιν ἄλφιτα, ἄρτους, οἶνον, τραγήματα). Although the meaning of the statement may be as prosaic as that all these goods were grown or hunted on Artemis’ sacred estate, the formulation is very significant: the goddess is the source of boon for the community. This divine provision of benefit, and the acceptance of this gift by the residents of Skillous, sets up the necessary mechanism of reciprocity, a prerequisite of a lasting relationship. This mechanism, at work in local religion, seems to be often overlooked or underappreciated – the act of opting into the relationship with the divine, where the community accepts the benefits seen as the bounty bestowed by a particular divinity and takes upon themselves the responsibility to reciprocate. Most of such relationships between the community and its gods and heroes would have been inherited and covered by the notion of the ‘ancestral sacred rites’ – (ἱερὰ) τὰ πάτρια. Historical cases of cult introductions expose the underpinning local dynamics of how human–divine relationships become ancestral and inherited. As in the cases of Xenokrateia, Pantalkes, and Archedamos, what testifies to the intention of translating a private religious gesture into a public benefit are the decisions to publicise the foundation in monumental inscriptions, and the expression of hope (which is a form of invitation) that the service of a god/hero would be taken up by others in the present and the future. In contrast to Xenokrateia, Pantalkes, and Archedamos, however, Xenophon is much more self-effacing. He does not say that he had set up the inscription, which stands (στήλη ἔστηκε) next to the temple, although presumably it was he who had done it.41 The account of the foundation in the Anabasis, the work addressing a Panhellenic audience and posterity, gives full credit to Xenophon, but the inscription, addressing the immediate ‘local horizon’ of Xenophon’s life at Skillous, does not. Another peculiar absence in the inscription, which is perhaps surprising and potentially revealing, is that it names the precinct as that of Artemis but without any epithet (ἱερὸς ὁ χῶρος τῆς Ἀρτέμιδος). She is not named the Artemis of Ephesos. If indeed the text of the inscription is given verbatim, the omission of the divine epiclesis is potentially significant. For Xenophon, it was important that he dispensed his vow to the specific Artemis of Ephesos, but the absence of that epiclesis in the inscription perhaps reveals

41

Xen. An. 5.3.13.

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the social pressure of the ‘local horizon’ – the people of Skillous to whom Artemis Ephesia would have been but a name. The inscription was publicfacing: its role was to identify to any outside visitor the divine owner of the temple and estate. To the locals, Xenophon’s motivation and identification of the Artemis of Skillous with that of Ephesos may have been known, but to outside visitors such local knowledge would not have been accessible, and they would be entirely expected to rely on the plain meaning of the inscription, which for all ends and purposes, was telling them that the shrine before them was that of ‘Artemis at Skillous’. In light of this consideration, we can interpret the omission of divine epiclesis as deliberate – Xenophon may have been aware of the potential difficulty of promoting the Artemis of Ephesos to his current community; the attitude would not be expeditious with a view to the continuity of the cult beyond his own day. We should also keep in mind that Xenophon’s foundation of a ἱερὸς χῶρος for Artemis may not have been the only place consecrated to Artemis in the local landscape: other Artemides may have already been worshipped by the Skillountians. For instance, there was a Sanctuary of Artemis Limnatis at Kombothekra, ‘but it is unknown which polis/poleis had the supervision of it’.42 Xenophon’s sanctuary, however, may have been aimed at becoming much more ‘local’ and close to home for the Skillountians. The clue to the absence of a cultic epiclesis in Xenophon’s inscription might be sought in the substance of the inscription, which is a cult regulation; as such, it looks to the future, beyond the circle of Xenophon’s contemporaries and beyond his time. This is where the ‘local horizon’ makes itself felt in conditioning Xenophon’s personal religious gesture: he may have been compelled to allow for the possibility that the specific personal meaning he had attached to the cult foundation would be in the future modified in accordance with the relationships that the locals would develop with the Artemis whose sanctuary was at Skillous – sooner or later this Artemis would simply become the ‘Artemis of Skillous’, even if for him she would always be the Artemis of Ephesos. This way of thinking, that a deity with a foreign identity could acquire a new local identity as a naturalised citizen in a new domicile, is a wellattested literary model of cult foundations. These were the stories told of Artemis Brauronia, Artemis Tauropolos, and Artemis Orthia – each figuring in a version of the story that derived the origin of the Attic and Spartan

42

Nielsen 2004: 541, with reference to Sinn 1978; 1981.

Personal or Communal?

cults from far-away Tauris, Parthenos of Tauris becoming Artemis upon reaching Greece.43 Similarly, the aition of Aphaia tells that the goddess was known as Britomartis and Diktynna in her place of origin, Crete, and acquired her name Aphaia only upon arrival on Aigina.44 A deity of a local cult can thus accommodate a memory of former (local) identity, while achieving a new local identity at the place of the cult’s transplantation. Examples can be multiplied.45 If such aetiological stories reflect a contemporary pattern of religious thinking, then Xenophon may have indeed chosen not to promote publicly the identity of his Artemis as Ephesia. Her identity was important to him personally, but he may have also foreseen the potential for her transformation into the local Artemis of Skillous unencumbered by her Ephesian origin. The second part of his inscription in fact anticipates that another as-yet-unknown person would come to be in charge of the ἱερὸς χῶρος of this Artemis at Skillous and would possess it and reap its fruits (τὸν ἔχοντα καὶ καρπούμενον), and whoever that person is, they should be instructed to set aside a dekate of proceeds from Artemis’ land for her annual sacrifice and from the excess (of income?) to provide for the maintenance of her temple. We do not in fact know how long Artemis’ shrine and cult endured at Skillous.46 The final sentence gives a hint of Xenophon’s precarious status there. There is apparently no official social group that by then had accepted the responsibility for the maintenance of the cult or bore the burden of the πάτρια ἔθεα

43 44 45

46

Paus. 1.33.1, 6.16.7–10. Paus. 2.30.3, Ant. Lib. Met. 40, and discussion in Polinskaya 2013: 178–79. And cross-cultural parallels can also be adduced. In early modern Naxos, as I will discuss in greater detail later in this paper, a cult surrounding an icon of Panagia Argokoiliotissa (discovered through dreams and digging of a mountainside at Argokoili in the district of Kóronos in eastern Naxos) and focused on a small church established at Argokoili in the 1850s was re-consecrated in 1920 to ‘an altogether different manifestation of the Panagia’ (Stewart 2017: 69, ‘[a]pparently, lacking the originally discovered icon of the Panagia Argokoiliotissa, the faithful had gradually shifted their focus’) – Panagia Zoodochou, that is, of the LifeGiving Source. Strabo (8.7.5) knows Xenophon’s text and mentions it in the description of Achaian cities, but the link is via the homonymous rivers called Selinos, one flowing through the city of Aegienses, another in Ephesos, the third in Elis (reference to Xenophon), and the fourth in Megara Hyblaea. Strabo has no contemporaneous knowledge about the shrine of Artemis at Skillous. A second-century CE inscription found on Ithaca (IG IX, I2 1700) that appears to be a copy of Xenophon’s sacred law for his shrine at Skillous is likely to be, as Graf (2013: 120) argues, a late imitation ‘at a time when the Greek elites were looking at their great past for models’. As such, the inscription does not indicate the continuity or longevity of the cult at Skillous, but familiarity with Classical literary texts.

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with respect to this deity.47 Since Xenophon cannot expect any such body to enforce the cult regulations, the only authority he can invoke is the goddess herself: she would look to it that her rites are observed and her rights are honoured (ἂν δέ τις μὴ ποιῇ ταῦτα τῇ θεῷ μελήσει). The inscription, although reported in a literary source, is a precious document of the dependence of private foundations on the positive communal response, their conditioning by the immediate ‘local horizon’. It then comes down to the question of: how ‘local’ was the community that Xenophon was hoping would opt into the worship of Artemis at Skillous? Xenophon says that καὶ πάντες οἱ πολῖται καὶ οἱ πρόσχωροι ἄνδρες καὶ γυναῖκες μετεῖχον τῆς ἐορτῆς.48 Some scholars prefer to downplay the presence of politai, rather emphasising the presence of οἱ πρόσχωροι that signal the formation of a ‘composite polity’ of worshippers based on spatial proximity.49 Yet it is not insignificant that Xenophon chooses to mention citizens and puts them ahead of οἱ πρόσχωροι. It is especially noteworthy that he states that ‘all citizens’ habitually took part (imperfect tense of μετεῖχον) in the festival, which does not square well with the evidence of the inscription set up next to the temple: the latter suggests a lack of politai’s formal commitment to the upkeep of the sanctuary. ‘All citizens’ rather hints at eligibility than actual participation, similar to all Athenians being eligible to attend the torch race in honour of Bendis in Piraeus, but not all and not always taking up the option. Bendis, however, was eventually voted onto the Athenian payroll and into the Athenian pantheon, the only foreign cult, as Thracians liked to think, to achieve such 47

48 49

Badian (2004: 45) sees the choice of tenses in Xenophon’s account as an indicator of chronology, whereby Xenophon returns to Skillous after 364 BCE and is able to witness the survival of his cult: ‘The imperfect is used to describe the annual festival he celebrated on the land he had dedicated to Artemis: that phase of his life was over when he wrote. The present and perfect, however, are used . . . in the description of the flora and fauna on the goddess’s land and the reference to the annual harvest festival that he had introduced (5.3.11), as still going on . . . We should probably follow the obvious implication of those present and perfect tenses: Xenophon had been back and had seen that his consecration and institution of the festival had indeed been recognized by Elis. This seems to lend some plausibility to the claim of Pausanias’ informants at Elis that Xenophon had been allowed to return and had indeed died and been buried at Scillus.’ This analysis of tenses is as much ingenious as it is speculative. Xen. An. 5.3.9. ‘The impression we get is that the circle of celebrants was determined by proximity, not political status. Whoever lived in the vicinity was invited to attend, the citizens from Skillous as much as the free inhabitants from nearby farms, hamlets, and smaller settlements south of the Alpheios river . . . The key to Xenophon’s festival was its double entrenchment in place and in what Kostas Vlassopoulos has labelled a “composite polity” (2007: 151): a community of people whose daily interactions were not only governed by the high-powered ideas of political belonging but by fluid constellations at the local level’ (Beck 2020: 136).

Personal or Communal?

a status.50 It is not certain that Artemis at Skillous in fact achieved the same status at any time. It can be argued that foundation inscriptions that name the founders and the deities honoured are themselves evidence of the intended public status of shrines. These monuments anticipate visitors to the shrine and seek to communicate with them. Explicit invitation to worship and publication of rules on how to do this demonstrate how an act of private religiosity is conditioned by the social context of religious communication: an individual’s personal dialogue with a deity implicitly acknowledges the simultaneous right of others to address the same deity and the impossibility to monopolise either the divine attention or the space of such interaction. When newly founded shrines appear in the public domain, with the customary invitation for others to come and worship there, they still for a while remain optional cults for many in the surrounding community. Such cults are not patria. Eleans, Triphylians, Skyllountai and/or πρόσχωροι of Artemis’s ἱερὸς χῶρος at Skillous do not owe ancestral worship to her nor do demesmen of Xenokrateia owe ancestral dues to Kephisos at that location. They can, as a matter of personal choice, participate in the worship of Artemis in Xenophon’s festival and worship Kephisos and his ξύμβωμοι θεοί in Phaleron, but no one would blame them if they do not. A link of mutual responsibility (divine contract) does not yet exist between these deities, their shrines, and the locals. It may take time for a newly introduced cult or a newly founded shrine to be accepted by the wider community. For that to happen, the community needs to be shown a benefit for themselves, or sometimes the opposite – the damage that nonrecognition or neglect of a deity – can do (cf. the premise of Euripides’ Bacchae).51 A divine epiphany or an oracle normally communicates to the community the nature of the problem and proffers a solution, such as introduction of a new cult, image, sacrifice, or another honour. Be it a local or a foreigner who, as a result of personal motivation, introduces a new cult, sets up a new shrine, or re-invigorates the one that

50

51

IG I3 136; see Wijma 2014: 126–56. The Thracian claim of their exceptional status as recipients of egktesis for the foundation of their sanctuary: IG II2 1283 (before the middle of the third century BCE): ἐπειδὴ τοῦ δήμου τοῦ Ἀθηναίων δεδωκότος τοῖς Θραιξὶ μόνοις τῶν ἄλλων ἐθνῶν τὴν ἔγκτησιν καὶ τὴν ἵδρυσιν τοῦ ἱεροῦ. The benefit formula is clearly outlined in Pantalkes’ inscription: the nymphs appoint Pantalkes ‘to set foot in these places and be their overseer’ (ἄνδρα δ’ ἐποιήσατ’ {α} ἀγαθὸν Παντάλκεα Νύμφαι / τῶνδ’ ἐπιβαινέμεναι χώρων καὶ ἐπίσσκοπον εἶναι), he then worked on their assignment (ὅσπερ ταῦτ’ ἐφύτευσε καὶ [ἐ]ξεπονήσατο χερσσίν) and in return they gave him (ἀντίδοσαν δ’ αὐτῶι) various boons (βίον ἄφθονον ἤματα πάντα).

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fell into disuse, in each case, this personal initiative faces the prospect of either remaining a private foundation that falls into obscurity or of gaining support in the broader local community and staying on, at least for some time. Only in the latter circumstances does such a cult become part of ‘local religion’, and in such cases, the active role of a local community in ‘opting into’ the cult is instrumental. The success of such projects is when personal religious initiative becomes a matter of public concern. A simple presence of a new cult foundation in a given locale was not enough to achieve the status of ‘local religion’. Communal opting-in was a necessary step in that transition.

‘Local’ and ‘More Local’: Spatial and Social Complications My effort in this paper so far has been to show that personal religious initiatives such as private cult foundations were bound up with communal interest and dependent on communal ‘opting into’ the cult. The circumscription of ‘community’ as a social and spatial entity is necessarily central to my arguments and has been previously addressed in the study of the local religious mesocosm of Aigina.52 Circumscription of local mesocosms is no simple matter, however, and is partly the reason why the model of ‘polis religion’ is so limiting. Such concepts as ‘communities of cult’ and ‘territories of grace’ are much more suitable to the conditions of polytheistic Mediterranean societies, with their variable micro-regions and microcommunities, as well as middle-ground mesocosms.53 In this array of possibilities, the social and spatial permutations of the ‘local’ are not always predictable. What makes circumscription of ‘local’ religious worlds so tricky is that communities that come together around religious matters often defy our expectations based on spatial, social, or political parameters if we take them in isolation from one another. In Attica, for instance, we expect demes to have distinct political and religious identities: Acharnai seem to have prided themselves on that score, and many sacrificial deme calendars lead us to think this way, and yet apparently, the demes of Marathon, Trikorynthos, Oinoe, and Probalinthos opted for a common political and

52 53

Polinskaya 2013. ‘Communities of cult’: Morgan 2003; ‘territories of grace’: Horden and Purcell 2000: 451; mesocosms: Polinskaya 2013: 36–37, 454, 464–65, 544.

Personal or Communal?

cultic identity as tetrapolitai rather than as demesmen.54 In the case of the Marathonian Tetrapolis, at least in the late fifth century BCE, the social definition of the ‘local’ defies the ‘spatial’ expectation. The demes of Attica suggest the existence of multiple and variable ‘local’ horizons: a resident of an Attic deme had dozens of deme deities and shrines to attend to each year, and only a handful of festivals which would have called them away from home (e.g. to Athens or Eleusis). One’s deme’s shrines would represent one type of ‘local’ horizons, central sanctuaries in Athens, another, and sanctuaries elsewhere in Attica, perhaps the third type, but such horizons may not have always neatly stacked. A demesman of Rhamnous may have had a rather complex or even conflicted sense of ‘local’ belonging in social and spatial terms, as the ‘community of cult’ around the shrine of Amphiaraos could have meant more to him than that around Eleusis. When we hear that Amyklaians, one of the five territorial communities of the city of Sparta, had a custom to return, even if they were far away from home, to Amyklai and the Sanctuary of Apollo Amyklaios, to sing a paean there every year, we observe the fractionality of ‘local horizons’ in Spartan religion: some ‘horizons’ were more local than others, and most were likely a matter of perspective.55 Further permutations include cases where a cult might be spatially, but not socially ‘local’. This would have been the case of Bendis granted a sanctuary in Piraeus, if, as I think is likely, her community of worshippers was originally limited to Thracian residents of Athens.56 A mid-thirdcentury BCE decree of the orgeōnes of Bendis in Piraeus suggests quite an exceptional arrangement that the orgeōnes were keen to stress: ‘the Athenian People has granted to the Thracians alone among all foreign peoples the right to acquire land and to found a sanctuary, in accordance with the oracle from Dodona’.57 In my view, the clause would have been 54

55

56

As Lambert (2018: 150) notes, Tetrapolis was considered to be ‘one of the original “Twelve Cities of Attica”, predating the synoecism’, and Philochorus apparently wrote its history (FGrHist 328 Philochorus F 94). ‘It seems to have been the most significant institutional locus of communal identity in the area, for while there are several inscriptions of the Tetrapolis, there is no extant inscription of any of the individual Tetrapolis demes’ (Lambert 2018: 150). Lambert 2018 shows that the sacrificial calendar of the Tetrapolis reveals the same locus of identity. Xen. Hell. 4.4.11. The famous example of perspectival identity expressed through the concept of nisba in Morocco can be found in Geertz’s ‘From the Native’s Point of View’: ‘A man I knew who lived in Sefrou and worked in Fez but came from the Beni Yazgha tribe settled nearby – and from Hima lineage of Taghut subfraction of the Wulad Ben Ydir fraction within it – was known as Sefroui to his work fellows in Fez, a Yazghi to all of us non-Yazghis in Sefrou, an Ydiri to other Beni Yazghas around, except for those who were themselves of the Wulad Ben Ydir fraction, who called him Taghuti’ (Geertz 1983: 66–67). 57 Cf. discussion in Wijma 2014. IG II2 1283, transl. by S. Lambert and R. Parker.

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formulated differently if the cult had been adopted as an Athenian cult from the start. Rather, it seems to have started as an exceptional grant of the right to worship to a metic community in Athens, and then gradually or otherwise came to be accepted by the Athenian community at large and officially accepted on the state payroll (first appears in the accounts of the Treasurers of the Other Gods in 429/428 BCE).58 While this cult was located within the confines of Attica, but not yet adopted by the Athenian community, it would have been ‘local’ only spatially, not socially. And yet even further complexity is at stake. Although eventually accepted by Athenian citizens as communal, the cult resisted complete integration of its originally narrow social group with the broader Athenian community: Thracians retained the right to organise their own procession alongside that of the Athenians, and private dedications to the goddess remained largely the practice of her Thracian worshippers, if votive inscriptions are anything to go by.59 Thus, even when the cult was finally ‘localised’ both spatially and socially, the social side remained unusually complex, even messy. Mismatch of spatial and social parameters in a local religious system is in evidence also on Aigina in the Archaic and Classical periods, where ‘local’ heroes Aiakos and the Aiakids travel beyond the spatial confines of their home territory, Aigina, to act on behalf of non-Aiginetans: Thebans, on one occasion, and allied Greeks, on another. In the meantime, another Aiginetan deity, Poseidon Kalaureios, happens to reside offshore, on the island of Poros in the Saronic Gulf, and communal interaction with the deity is presumably effected by representatives, as it is unlikely that large numbers of Aiginetans would have travelled to Poros, ancient Kalaureia, for the sacrifice. Of course, as this Poseidon was an amphictyonic deity, other members of the amphictyony would have also had a right to claim him as their own ‘local’ god in social, if not in spatial terms.60

Lessons from Ethno-archaeology: A ‘Local’ Cult of Buried Icons on Naxos Complex spatial and social layering of local horizons in ancient Greece is often difficult for us to imagine and even more difficult to detect and 58 60

59 IG I3 383, lines 142–43. Parker 1996: 170–75. Polinskaya 2013: 136–39 (lending of cult images of Aiakos and Aiakids); 316–18 (Poseidon Kalaureios); 456–64 (on ‘Deities and Worshippers in and out of Aigina’).

Personal or Communal?

reconstruct due to a paucity of relevant sources. Modern ethnographic studies can sometimes help, as a form of ethno-archaeology, by offering typological parallels, or presenting scenarios that provoke fruitful comparisons, if only to point out differences. In the analysis of the local Aiginetan mesocosm I was aided by insights gained from a case study of cultural anthropology conducted in modern Nepal.61 In the present study, I suggest that an excursus into the early modern and modern history of Naxos, one of the Cycladic Greek islands, may prove useful. The time frame spans the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The case is of personal religious experiences (prophetic dreams and epiphanies affecting select individuals) revolving around ancient buried icons in Naxos’ district of Kóronos (a thin slice of the island territory, in its north-east quadrant).62 It is a protracted saga of the dreamers’ and their followers’ struggle to have their experiences believed, validated, and accepted by various gradations of ‘local’ communities on their island and beyond. The island of Naxos in the Cyclades is about 430 km2 in area, today with about 19,000 residents. It is mountainous, with a highest peak of 1,003 m. The main port of the island today is Chora (the capital of the island) on its west coast. Even in modern times, the island’s administrative and territorial divisions changed multiple times. With the Mediterranean geology not significantly changed since the first millennium BCE, we may expect to learn something useful about the social geography of ancient Greece from the observation of modern patterns. Of interest to us is not necessarily the precise, but approximate outlines of the island’s human geography. As recently as 2011, Naxos was divided into eleven administrative territorial districts with anywhere from one to eight villages, or communities (δημοτική κοινότητα), belonging to each – overall thirty-five communities in eleven districts. Anyone who has ever travelled and studied ethnography in Greece or, for that matter, of many other comparable Mediterranean regions would know that a single island, especially a mountainous one, can be perceived by its residents as highly compartmentalised: mountain gorges separate interior regions from one another making communication over land difficult. Often the natural routes of communication run uplands, from the coast with a usable beach and harbour, into the interior of the island and to higher elevations along the natural ravines. The 61 62

Levy 1990; on ‘mesocosm’ and Levy’s study: Polinskaya 2013: 32–37, 451–64 and passim. Stewart 2017: 116, fig. 17 (map of the communal district of Kóronos) and fig. 3 (map of Naxos with positions of Kóronos and Argokoíli).

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slopes of such ravines house clusters of habitation at various elevations determined often by the presence of flatter grounds or water sources such as springs. Thus sliced as a pie, with wedges meeting at an imaginary point in the island’s centre, parts of the island territory can feel for island residents as separate worlds, or if not separate, then in any case distinct and self-centred. We may envision the κοινότητες/communities of Cycladic Islands, such as Naxos, as not simply arbitrary and abstract administrative divisions but many of them as environmentally and historically determined units. My short summary of events of interest for the present paper draws on the excellent study of Charles Stewart, based on his anthropological and ethnographic fieldwork.63 The events unfolded in the part of Naxos that was geologically rich in emery, with mining being a source of income and livelihood for several communities there (around Kóronos and Apeiranthos). Control of the emery-rich land was gradually lost by Naxiotes in the period between the early and middle nineteenth century, as the young Greek state sought to nationalise mineral resources.64 It was not accidental that religious events that began to unfold in the same period were also connected to digging, this time in search of ancient icons, and ‘[t]he dreaming and digging at Argokoili thus occurred during a period in which local relationships to the land, the past, and the nation’s ancestors were rapidly being superseded’.65 Two ‘epidemics’ of dreaming, as Stewart calls them, occurred each in a cluster of several years in the 1830s and then in the 1930s in the district of Kóronos. Dreams and daytime visions affected individuals, mainly shepherds in the 1830s, and a school teacher and children in the 1930s. In the visions, various figures of the Christian pantheon, mainly Panagia, but also various saints, appear to the dreamers and encourage them to dig for ancient icons buried in the nearby mountain side and then to consecrate appropriate housing (chapels, churches) for the sacred icons. In the 1830s, dreams affected several people, one after another, becoming as it were contagious, and led believers to dig and find several icons, with many participants in the digging instantly convinced of divine guidance by the authenticity of their personal religious experiences. Meanwhile, the orthodox religious authorities of Naxos reacted variously over time, some of the lower-ranked priests endorsing and supporting the digging and acceptance of icons, and higher-ranked ones (e.g. archbishop) labelling both dreaming

63

Stewart 2017.

64

Ibid.: 56–58.

65

Ibid.: 58.

Personal or Communal?

and digging for icons as the work of the devil. The ‘charismatic movement’ was in those years effectively stifled by the confiscation of the icons and their storage out of sight on the other side of the island. Thus, the diggers’ quest to worship Panagia and build a church remained unfulfilled for a while but continued to inspire further religious activity, which finally led to an official turn-about and permission to build a small church of Panagia Argokoiliotissa in 1851, albeit without the icons discovered through digging.66 The events of the 1830s in the Kóronos district of Naxos present to us a case of a highly localised religious experience, directly connected to the local land and its resources and at the same time connected to the people’s sense of attachment to their past and their identity. They also illustrate how personal religious experience of several individuals came up against the test of communal acceptance, where a particular combination of local interests and competing authorities intervened to halt an instant transformation of personal religious experiences (messages from saints and Panagia sent in dreams to specific individuals) into a public and communally accepted cult.67 The first wave of dreaming and the discovery of icons did not lead to a cult foundation, but within twenty years, and as a result of a process of attrition, a small version of a shrine came into being.68 The second series of events ensued in 1930, with dreams again guiding visionaries, this time to rediscover the icon of Panagia, ‘lost and forgotten’

66

67

68

Ibid.: 67: ‘By the early 1850s the cult of the Panagia Argokoiliotissa was in an odd predicament. The authorities had reversed themselves and allowed a church dedicated to the Panagia to be consecrated, but they had confiscated all the newly discovered icons, thereby removing the focus of reverence.’ Ibid.: 53–54: ‘Much of what we know about the movement in mountain Naxos comes from the records of governmental and ecclesiastical attempts to suppress it. Had the villagers been left alone to dig the earth, keep their icons, and build their church – as they would have been allowed under the Ottomans – it is possible that the movement might have petered out after a few years or quietly left its mark by contributing one more local manifestation of the Panagia to the Orthodox repertoire. Instead state suppression and popular expression locked into a spiralling reciprocal logic of social action.’ Ibid.: 47–48: ‘The synod ordered Gavriil to stop this movement from progressing . . . Gavriil was caught in a bind between fostering a visionary movement as he had done on Tinos and doing the anticharismatic bidding of the synod’. ‘By mid-1836, after the discovery of the icons, the beleaguered bishop and the Holy Synod no doubt hoped that the inhabitants of Kóronos would return to their normal lives. In a step to insure this outcome, the synod’s investigator prevailed upon two of the local priests to sign a document promising, “upon pain of being defrocked”, not to celebrate offices using new icons and not to take the icons back to the discovery site . . . The villagers delegated two representatives . . . to submit a notarized petition (dated 25 February 1837) to the king of Greece to build a new church of Panagia Theotokou at Argokoíli. Three local priests signed the petition in support. The request was denied.’

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among other icons in a private house in the Chora, port town of Naxos. The rediscovered icon was returned to Argokoili, with 4,000 or 5,000 faithful in attendance; then, a new instruction to search for an icon of St. Anne, also received in a dream at this time, produced a temporary flurry of digging activity, which however proved fruitless.69 Of particular interest to us is that the historical context of these events reveals both a wave of excitement among some and a surge of resentment among other locals in response to personal religious experiences of dreaming individuals. There were many who did not ‘opt into’ the unfolding religious project, so that even saints in the dreams complained of the faithless and demanded that all and not just one or two people should believe in dream revelations.70 Dreams began to feature proselytising missions to countries around the world, and digging for icons began to be promoted as the only spiritually acceptable form of digging, in opposition to commercial mining for emery.71 As in the 1830s, local church authorities in 1930 condemned the dreamers and their public appeal. The local priest Father Legakis relabelled ‘visionaries’ (oneirovamenoi) ‘dream maniacs’ (oneiromaneis) and accused them of idolatry.72 Once again, we see that religious events revolve around a small group of individuals who undergo personal religious visitations and publicise them through public recitations of their dreams. The church is against them, but it is the reaction of other Naxiotes that is of interest to us. Among them, there are those who believe and support, and also those who ridicule or condemn the dreamers. These attitudes fluctuate over time.73 Overall, the events in the 1930s provide evidence of a long-lasting tradition and of continuity of local memory and religious practice (dreaming and digging), but they also illustrate the variety of local horizons that come into play on Naxos. The local horizon at the epicentre of events is Kóronos and Argokoili. Dreams occur either to those who live in the

69 70

71

72

73

Ibid.: 70–75. Ibid.: 82–85. ‘As the search for the icon carried over into the summer of 1930, the dreamers and their followers ran into opposition from unbelieving fellow villagers.’ Ibid.: 87: ‘In Koronos, the dreamers’ messages created an intolerable amount of social disruption. Not everyone accepted the moral strictures and the economic hardship that the visionaries advised.’ Ibid.: 88: ‘Another local priest . . . considered the dreamers to be in heresy and declined to offer them communion . . . The bishop, in Athens serving on the Holy Synod at the time, issued a proclamation urging the dreamers and their followers to return to normal daily lives.’ Ibid.: 89: ‘In August . . . the disenchanted supporters finally began to drift away . . . The dreamers and their followers were reduced to a hard core developing ever more elaborate symbols and narratives of redemption.’

Personal or Communal?

immediate vicinity of these villages, or to those who are connected to them by descent (thus, spatial and social dimensions) – religious experiences are linked either to places that were the scene of religious revelations, or to people who were heirs to the dreaming tradition. This local horizon remains confined to a particular corner of Naxos, and the cult of Panagia Argokoiliotissa remains optional for the Naxiote community at large: some make a pilgrimage to the shrine on the day of panegyri, but others do not. The cult and the church exist on the margins, both spatial and social, of the religious life of Naxos, where dozens of other parish churches and local chapels, including those of Panagia, proliferate. Many doubters remain who do not get on board with the aetiological narrative of revelations and do not get swept up by the charismatic movement, happy to stick with ancestral (τὰ πάτρια) and pre-existing sacred sites and deities already in their land. Against the backdrop of Greece, Naxos itself might appear as a ‘local horizon’ of religious life; however, a closer look, especially in light of the epidemics of dreaming surrounding the district of Kóronos, reveals that Naxos is not a single uniform and homogenous local horizon, but contains multiple local horizons. The ‘local’ cult of buried icons was outlined spatially by the district of Kóronos, while in social terms, the ‘community of cult’ may have numbered mostly Koronidiates, but not all of them, and presumably accommodated followers from other parts of Naxos as well. The story of the cult of Panagia Argokoiliotissa does not end in the 1930s, however. While for decades it represented just one among many local horizons of religious life on Naxos, in 1992, on the initiative of a newly appointed bishop of Paros and Naxos, Amvrosios II, the pilgrimage to Argokoili was officially raised to Pan-Naxos status, enabling pilgrims’ donations to be held tax-free. This endorsement can be compared to a vote in the Athenian assembly of the fifth century BCE that had elevated the cult of Bendis to a state level cult eligible for financial support. Furthermore, soon ‘new proposals came in advocating a further “upgrade” to a Panhellenic (i.e. national) pilgrimage and, furthermore, the building of a large church at Argokoili in fulfilment of the prophecies’, and in 1995, ‘the proposal to build a large church at Argokoili was accepted as a cause to be supported by all Naxos village associations’.74 The church was consecrated in 1997 and built on the donations of some two million Euros made by individuals from Naxos, Greece, and the Greek diaspora across the world.

74

Ibid.: 158.

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Raised to the national level of recognition, the cult of Argokoiliotissa became not a marginal local cult of Kóronos, but a Naxiote cult: the ‘local horizon’ moved outward from the spatial epicentre in the Kóronos district to the physical contours of the whole island, and the social horizon of the cult expanded to encompass believers and pilgrims from beyond Naxos, sometimes even beyond Greece. This case of a local cult of buried icons raises important questions and proffers typologically comparable scenarios for understanding the interplay between the territorial and social dimensions of ‘local religion’ in modern as much as in ancient Greece. Spatially and territorially, this case shows how the presence of a religious site or of certain religious activity (dreaming about buried icons and digging for them) in a particular village produces a spatial anchor, a focus, that instantly makes the site or activity linked to that geographic location ‘local’, but the social dimension surrounding the site complicates geographic clarity. Over the decades and even centuries, the ‘community of cult’ centred on the veneration of the icons of Kóronos and Argokoíli fluctuated between a handful of village residents to the broader district of Kóronos with its several (four to five) villages, further to the whole of Naxos and even beyond, becoming a destination for pilgrims from other Cycladic Islands and the mainland. As well as the size and composition of the community of cult changing, the meaning of ‘local’ cult fluctuated too: from extremely narrow (one village in one district) to being a hallmark cult of Naxos as a whole. The fluctuation in cult’s reach reflects the dynamics of ‘opting in’ or ‘staying out’. Emerging as a topical phenomenon within a pre-existing religious pantheon and cultic topography of parishes and churches, the cult of newly discovered icons was for a long time not part of ta patria, but rather optional, allowing for either the path of ‘opting in’ or ‘staying out’. We may further appreciate, observing this case, the complex dynamics of personal and communal interests and benefits in ‘local’ religion: individuals who experience and publicise their religious revelations are usually locals who are known in small face-to-face communities and so are the more readily trusted; personal experiences of select individuals impact on their immediate social circles because the latter are inclined to believe and opt into the discourse of their neighbours and acquaintances. Such a ‘local horizon’, due to its social factor (face-to-face society), is well set up to absorb and incorporate personal religious experiences and translate them into communal projects. Where such processes stall is at the borders of narrowly defined ‘local horizons’ where they come up against doubts and opposition from those who do not know the originators of religious innovation (that is, when

Personal or Communal?

they come up against ‘local horizons’ of others) and have to be convinced of personal benefit that would accrue to themselves (as e.g. in Pantalkes’ case) from the communal adoption of a new cult. State-level authority is then needed to decide the fate of a budding ‘local cult’, either validating personal experiences of individuals from a given location and from a given community or quashing the charismatic movement.

Concluding Thoughts Cross-cultural examples, taken from ethno-archaeology, often allow us to observe the dynamics of social discourse around personal religious experiences that our ancient sources lack or leave out. While we do not know if Xenokrateia’s or Xenophon’s initiative provoked communal debate among demesmen or πρόσχωροι regarding ‘opting in’ in Classical Attica or Triphylia, we do know that ‘dreaming and digging’ in modern Kóronos did. While we may wonder about the exact localisation of ‘local horizons’ in the religious lives of Anagyrous (ancient Vari) and Skillous, we can see that these horizons could shrink and expand (as they did on Naxos) depending on the fluctuating social horizons of the religious movement inspired by the cult of buried icons. I offer two sets of conclusions – the first relates to the social-spatial determinants of ‘local horizons’: (a) a ‘local horizon’ of religion is not spatially predetermined or (securely) predictable; (b) the spatial dimension of a ‘local horizon’ is always tempered by the social; (c) a ‘local horizon’ is conditioned by the interplay between spatial and social dimensions; and (d) a ‘local horizon’ is dynamic, fluctuating in response to changes in the social dimension. The second set relates to the personal–communal dynamics of ‘local horizons’: (a) much of personal religion in ancient Greece completely overlapped with communal religion, with personal interests and benefits identical to those of the community; (b) communal religion was fuelled by individual participation and largely impossible without personal religious contributions; (c) personal religion was conditioned by communal response; and (d) communal religion was often the result of personal initiative. Bibliography Badian, E. (2004) ‘Xenophon the Athenian’, in C. Tuplin (ed.) Xenophon and His World. Papers from a Conference Held in Liverpool in July 1999. Stuttgart, 33–53. Beck, H. (2020) Localism and the Ancient Greek City-State. Chicago, Ill. and London.

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  Casevitz, M. (1995) ‘Sur eschatia. Histoire du mot’, in A. Rousselle (ed.) Frontières terrestres, frontières célestes dans l’antiquité. Paris, 19–30. Connor, W. R. (1988) ‘Seized by the Nymphs: Nympholepsy and Symbolic Expression in Classical Greece’, Classical Antiquity 7, 155–89. Geertz, C. (1983) ‘“From the Native’s Point of View”: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding’, in C. Geertz (ed.) Local Knowledge. Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York, N.Y., 55–70. Graf, F. (2013) ‘Individual and Common Cult: Epigraphic Reflections’, in J. Rüpke (ed.) The Individual in the Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean. Oxford, 115–35. Horden, P. and N. Purcell (2000) The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History. Oxford. Jameson, M. H. (2002) ‘Attic Eschatiai’, in K. Ascani et al. (eds.) Ancient History Matters: Studies Presented to Jens Erik Skydsgaard on His Seventieth Birthday. Rome, 63–68. Lambert, S. (2018) ‘Individual and Collective in the Funding of Sacrifices in Classical Athens: The Sacrificial Calendar of the Marathonian Tetrapolis’, in F. Eijnde, J. H. Blok and R. Strootman (eds.) Feasting and Polis Institutions. Leiden, 149–80. Levy, R. (1990) Mesocosm. Hinduism and the Organization of a Traditional Newar City in Nepal. Berkeley, Calif. and Los Angeles, Calif. Mikalson, J. (2016) New Aspects of Religion in Ancient Athens: Honors, Authorities, Esthetics, and Society. Leiden. Morgan, C. (2003) Early Greek States beyond the Polis. London and New York, N.Y. Nielsen, T. H. (2004) ‘Triphylia’, in M. H. Hansen and T. H. Nielsen (eds.) An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis. Oxford, 540–46. Papadopoulou, C. (2018) ‘Attic Sanctuaries’, Archaeological Reports 64, 103–12. Parker, R. (2011) On Greek Religion. Ithaca, N.Y. and London. (1996) Athenian Religion: A History. Oxford. Polinskaya, I. (2012) ‘Calling upon Gods as Witnesses in Ancient Greece’, Mètis. Anthropologie des mondes grecs anciens. Dossier: Serments et paroles efficaces. New Series 10, 23–37. (2013) A Local History of Greek Polytheism: Gods, People, and the Land of Ancient Aigina, 800–400 BCE. Leiden. Purvis, A. (2003) Singular Dedications. Founders and Innovators of Private Cults in Classical Greece. New York, N.Y. and London. Schörner, G. and H. R. Goette (2004) Die Pan-Grotte von Vari (with contribution by K. Hallof ). Mainz am Rhein. Segev, M. (2017) Aristotle on Religion. Cambridge. Sinn, U. (1978) ‘Das Heiligtum der Artemis Limnatis bei Kombothekra’, Athenische Mitteilungen 93, 45–82.

Personal or Communal? (1981) ‘Das Heiligtum der Artemis Limnatis bei Kombothekra’, Athenische Mitteilungen 96, 25–71. Steinhauer, G. (1994) “Παρατηρήσεις στην οικιστική μορφή των αττικών δήμων”, in W. D. E. Coulson et al. (eds.) The Archaeology of Athens and Attica under the Democracy: Proceedings of an International Conference Celebrating 2500 Years since the Birth of Democracy in Greece, Held at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, December 4–6, 1992. Oxford, 175–90. Stewart, C. (2017) Dreaming and Historical Consciousness in Island Greece. Chicago, Ill. Vlassopoulos, K. (2007) Unthinking the Greek Polis: Ancient Greek History beyond Eurocentrism. Cambridge. Weller, C. H. (1903) ‘The Cave at Vari’, American Journal of Archaeology 7(3), 263–349. Wijma, S. (2014) Embracing the Immigrant. The Participation of Metics in the Athenian Polis Religion (5th–4th century BC). Stuttgart.

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How to Write a Local History of Imperial Greek Cults: Observations from Pausanias  

The Greek travel writer Pausanias (second century CE) provides the best literary evidence for the study of local religion in ancient Greece. His Periēgēsis is truffled with a myriad of local idiosyncrasies and instantations, often discreet and rich in nuance, that make Pausanias a crown witness to the lived experience of Greek religion. Greta Hawes’ chapter alerts readers of the shortcomings of a mining approach to the Periēgēsis. Her literary study argues for a twofold topographic architecture, one governed by the geographical spaces described, one by their careful placement in the text. The question of where local specificities are discussed in the narrative, she argues, is as critical to how they are perceived as the actual information conveyed. The article thus also speaks to the analytical challenge of interpreting a narrative that is, on the one hand, reflective of the non-linear and essentially decentralised nature of the local, yet on the other filters this nature through the linear rigours of writing. Starting from fleeting experiences of the local, highly subjective to the individual that makes them, the author turns to an exemplary discussion of Argos, Thebes, and Messenia that exposes the mechanics of a scripted localism, a literary approximation to place. In the subsequent section, the discussion of Pausanias’ localistic perspective extends to the narrative technique of cross-references – a prominent feature in the Periēgēsis – and also to instances where such connections were deliberately denied: the case in point being Pausanias’ treatment of the notorious problem of the location of Homeric Pylos.

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Local religion plays out between the enduring specificities of place and the fleeting experiences of participants; it is built simultaneously upon the unique phenomena of habitual traditions and their situation within a vast system of cultural analogues. What is specific to a locale is thus both confined in time and space, and potentially boundless in its capacity to evoke other times and places. I am thinking here not primarily of the concrete aspects of space. It scarcely needs repeating that physical locations

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acquire human significance through accretions created out of communal familiarity: the verbal attachments of placenames and stories; the imagined realm of personal and communal memories; and the visual language of collective symbols. Rather, my particular concern with the boundlessness of local cult lies in the fact that places invariably connect to others, so that no single locale exists alone, and merely for itself. These connections might be mapped as ties between nodes and displayed as an all-encompasing network. But what then of the role of the unpredictable and fleeting? Connections exist because people make them; yet any one individual might intuit any number of relationships. There is a highly personal form of localism bound up in the idiosyncrasies of human experience: standing beside one temple, a visitor’s mind might flit to some other sanctuary as she senses commonalities, considers parallels, remembers past rituals, revises preconceptions, or simply longs for some place different. To focus unduly on the idiosyncrasies that can undergird local attachments in practice risks rarifying ‘the local’ out of existence. Too often we treat the phrase ‘local tradition’ as if the adjective were a synonym for ‘undocumented’, ‘obscure’, ‘minor’, or indeed the key criterion for ‘the authentic’.1 By the very nature of our evidence, ancient religion exists for us in what endures. That said, what survives does so frequently on account of its connections, and conceptualising how such ties functioned within an intricate network gives the study of Greek religion a messier, more realistic foundation. It can no longer be thought of as a product of the clearly demarcated polis, of hierarchical politics, or of a set of dominant polarities operating in isolation. Rather, it emerges from innumerable fluid, multi-dimensional, and multi-directional interactions.2 And capturing these involves inevitably capturing also the idiomatic perspectives that created them. Finding a way to describe inter-linked phenomena is a practical challenge of its own. In part, we lack the necessary language. As Victoria Rimell notes, the conventional idiom of the humanities abounds in ‘fields, borders, faultlines and thresholds’, and struggles to put into words ‘the non-linear or multidimensional’.3 I would add, further, that the very technology of written language is at odds with what we observe of the relational nature of Greek religion. Descriptive prose is linear: one thing proceeds another in chain-linked order. It does not lend itself naturally to documenting 1 2 3

See Beck 2020: 1. See esp. Taylor and Vlassopoulos 2015, on the study of ancient history more generally. Rimell 2017: 5.

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decentralised networks.4 And it is hierarchical in another way, too, in that those topics discussed at greater length seem more important in that they quite literally take up more written space. Further, it relies on shorthands which necessarily flatten events according to dominant organising principles. In the specific case of Greek prose, this means adopting a political framework that delineates according to constellations of civic and ethnic affiliations. When an ancient historian attributes knowledge and agency to massed epichoric groups (‘the Argives say . . .’, ‘the Spartans do not agree . . .’, ‘the Athenians point out . . .’), these speech acts only make sense if we understand them though a normative lens and accept that the critical unit of concern here is the recognisably chauvinistic projections found in the collective actions of the polis. The rhetoric of the ‘local’ is quickly aligned in practice with that of the civic. A description of the local nature of Imperial Greek cult thus places in tension two distinct phenomena. The first is the very real sense in which cult practice was – on the ground – both a shared and an idiomatic activity experienced within a complex set of ever-shifting relationships. The second – equally real – is the formal constraints of prose, which control how such complexity is captured in words. Textualisation creates a particular narratological challenge; observations must be corralled into grammatically complete sentences, linear paragraphs, comprehensible arguments, and navigable structures. It is, by its very nature, distinct from the fleeting thoughts, half-finished sentences, incompletely examined habits and random coincidences which punctuate the actual experience of a ritual. But we should not for this reason consign it to the category of the secondary or the second-best. Pausanias’ Periēgēsis gives us one approximated amalgam of the dynamics of local experiences. We are not dealing here with a ‘fantasy’, but with a ‘world in words’, a representation of Greece.5 And like all expressions of the local, it is a fragmented glimpse.6 Looking carefully at how Pausanias conveys and discusses the local nature of Greek religion shows us the unavoidable consequences of granular perspectives; Greek cult is simultaneously a recognisable community of practice and a tradition held together by dispute and rivalry. The interactions go well beyond the local and the ‘global’ (however we understand 4

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Digital techniques for semantic annotation of texts show great potential in this area. There is, for example, the digital Periēgēsis project: Barker, Foka and Konstantinidou 2020. Cf. Elsner 2001: 18: ‘His “Greece” is of course a fantasy. It consisted of an enchanted past, of living myths and rituals whose apparent antiquity guaranteed their modern meanings, of ruins and monuments executed by the hallowed hands of the great.’ For the fragmented image of localism in our ancient source material, see Beck 2020: 41–42.

How to Write a Local History of Imperial Greek Cults

that in this context); they involve locals accommodating, disputing, and conspiring with other locals. Local chauvinism – that predictable habit of communities to speak to their own advantage – is the engine for preserving and improvising traditions in an open system marked necessarily by loquacity and subjectivity.

The Localism of Pausanias’ Periēgēsis It is quite uncontroversial to say that Pausanias provides our best documentary evidence for local Greek religion. What Pausanias gives us is one possible rendering of it as living practice. His is a scripted localism, an approximation of local experience. It is necessarily artificial in that it has been crafted in textual form. The importance of the Periēgēsis is in large part a consequence of its comprehensive scope. Over ten books it describes the sights and traditions of the southern and central Greek mainland. Its structure emphasises granular detail. For each place, Pausanias typically offers both a chronological account of its myth-history and an itinerary that describes what might be seen by a traveller tracing an ideal route through it.7 The particular value of the Periēgēsis as an archive rests on its perspective. Pausanias does not tell us what Greek religion is; he shows us through myriad instantiations. The whole is present in its parts; indeed, Pausanias’ phrase πάντα τὰ Ἑλληνικά quite literally has something recognisably and pervasively Hellenic emerging precisely from the experience of its plurality.8 So, as Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge puts it, The journey through Greece is a concrete experience that makes each place visited, each landmark encountered – chosen for this purpose – a component of the definition of Greekness. Landmarks evoked briefly or at length – and sometimes even the landscape itself – become keys that open doors amongst hundreds of other keys and hundreds of other doors that provide a fragment of what Greekness is.9 7

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This description is necessarily broad. The structure of the Periēgēsis is not invariable: Pausanias develops it over the course of the first two books, and further modifies it to fit different circumstances as the work proceeds. The best general analysis appears in Hutton 2005: 54–174; the Valla commentaries offer substantial overviews of each book. The phrase occurs at 1.26.4, a passage too often read in isolation as a kind of programmatic statement for the work. It has nonetheless productive resonances for thinking of Hellenism as a communal set of traditions and not primarily a delineated territory: Hutton 2005: 57–58. Pirenne-Delforge 2008: 347: ‘Le voyage de Grèce est une expérience concrète qui fait de chaque lieu parcouru, de chaque monument croisé, lorsqu’ils sont choisis è cette fin, une parcelle de la définition de la grécité. Le monument – ou parfois le paysage – évoqué, plus ou moins

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To express the intertwining of the Panhellenic with the local, PirenneDelforge relies upon a spatial vocabulary of connectivity. She describes Pausanias ‘weaving’ together material within a ‘grid’ which operates horizontally across geographic space and vertically through intersecting genealogies.10 So, ‘all Greek things’ – the Panhellenic whole – both precede and result from Pausanias’ composite observations of what is worthy of record. This web of broadly diffused Panhellenic traditions takes in such nebulous phenomena as unarticulated expectations, habitual inferences, and patterns of conventional reasoning that serve as the base layer for cultural norms.11 Without a shared Hellenic paideia no cooperation or dispute is possible. So, by convention, Greek hero cult requires that participants conceive of the world of the present as spatially co-terminous with the world of myth so that the ancient tombs that dotted the landscape are quite literally the resting places of exceptional beings who at once belong to the soil of Greece and are out of place within it. Implicit too are assumptions about civic ownership: founders, eponyms, notable visitors and the relics they left behind are artefacts of communal identity in the here-and-now. Such shared assumptions lend cult practice both meaning and power. Common traditions have a superfluity to them: their proliferation cannot provoke accusations of cultural theft. So, the idea that a polis would be named for an eponymous hero(ine) allows each community to claim its own civic totem without stepping upon the exclusive preserve of its neighbours, whose hero(in)es likewise share their names with their cities. Quite different in their dynamics from these diffuse Panhellenic phenomena are those traditions which forge particular connections between specific communities. They might involve supra-local cooperation, as when a hero is agreed to have departed one location and arrived in another, or to have been born into a family associated with one region and married into another, or to have taken rites from one sanctuary to another. They are more noticeable when they highlight competing claims of ownership. A perfect example occurs towards the end of Pausanias’ description of

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brièvement selon les cas, devient la clé qui ouvre une porte, parmi des centaines d’autres clés et d’autres portes, qui livre un fragment de ce qui est grec.’ E.g. Pirenne-Delforge 2008: 32: ‘Le tissage des matériaux suit une logique concrète.’ E.g. 48: ‘Ainsi, étant donné le cadre géographique de l’entreprise, le passé est quadrille, verticalement par les développements sur les généalogies locales, horizontalement par l’évocation d’une éventuelle participation aux grands événements communs de la Grèce.’ My formulation here owes much to the concept of ‘implicit theology’ described by Larson 2016, but is not identical to it.

How to Write a Local History of Imperial Greek Cults

Argos, a city whose ritual landmarks he repeatedly depicts as infringing the traditions of others:12 I do not agree with these of their claims: the Argives say that there is at Argos a tomb of Deianera, daughter of Oeneus, and one of Helenos, son of Priam, and that as the statue of Athena that they have is the one removed from Troy that caused its downfall. Regarding the Palladion (as it is called), it is clear that it was in fact taken by Aeneas to Italy. Regarding Deianeira, we know that her death occurred near Trachis and not at Argos, and her tomb is near Herakleia, beneath Mount Oeta. My account has already covered the story of Helenos, son of Priam: he went to Epeiros with Pyrrhos, son of Achilles, and having married Andromache served as guardian to Pyrrhos’ children. The place called Kestrine takes its name from Kestrinos, his son. In actual fact, even the Argive guides have recognised that not everything they say is entirely true, but they continue to say it nonetheless; for it is not an easy thing to make the general population change what they believe.13

Pausanias denies the Argives the authenticity of the objects they identify as the tombs of Deianeira and Helenos and the Trojan Palladion by invoking here the traditions of others. This logic – that specific, shared traditions cannot proliferate promiscuously – is particularly conspicuous in the Periēgēsis. It is a natural consequence of the Periēgēsis’ perspective, which is both concerned with the granular description of places and written from the normative position of a supra-local, trans-regional viewpoint. Less noticeable in this passage is what does not make it into the archive. Whatever significance these relics had to the Argives is now lost. When Pausanias mentions the two tombs and the statue only to dismiss them as fake, whatever knowledge made sense of these monuments through the everyday experiences of those that lived among them is likewise dismissed. We get no Argive history of how the Palladion came to be in their possession or why they thought Deianeira and Helenos might have ended up buried there. We get no description of the appearance of these objects, where they even were in the city, or of the rituals that might have celebrated them. The prerogative owed to the polis to explain its own past is ignored. Presumably these landmarks were backdrops for cultic

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E.g. Paus. 2.19.5 (fire of Phoroneus), 2.19.8 (tombs of Linos and Prometheus), 2.21.4 (tomb of Pyrrhos), 2.21.9–10 (temple built by surviving children of Niobe), 2.22.2–3 (tomb of Tantalos), 2.23.3 (tomb of Hyrnetho). For Pausanias’ assessment of Argos’ mythic landmarks, see Hawes 2021: 5, 91, 102–4. Paus. 2.23.5–6. All translations are my own.

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performance, a communal activity that by its very nature persuades its participants of their authenticity in the moment. (As Barbara Kowalzig puts it, ‘you cannot argue with a song’.)14 Yet there is none of this in Pausanias’ rapid dismissal. In a passage he ostensibly devotes to Argive sights and Argive traditions, we get rather the perspective from the ‘correct’ location of these relics: Italy, Trachis, and Epeiros. This is not to say that such seemingly etic incursions are necessarily foreign to an Argive understanding: Hellenic knowledge, beyond being a body of facts, is comprised also of a series of disputes over it. Pausanias’ final comment suggests that the duplication was recognised at Argos too, so that the ties pointing elsewhere would thicken the cultic networks on the ground as well.15 Two cities both claiming to have the tomb of the same hero need not – counter-intuitively – express anatagonism; the duplication of Hippolytos’ tomb at Athens and Troizen appear to signal a friendly diplomatic relationship between two nearby communities; those of Mopsos at Kolophon and Siris do not seem to have sparked hostility.16 But in this passage, Pausanias presents the duplications as mutually contradictory and indicative of chauvinistic errors on Argos’ part. Herodotus famously concluded his discussion of various poleis’ different accounts for why the Argives did not fight with the Greeks against the Persians with the comment that ‘I am obliged to say what is said, but I am not obliged to believe it all’ (ἐγὼ δὲ ὀφείλω λέγειν τὰ λεγόμενα, πείθεσθαί γε μὲν οὐ παντάπασι ὀφείλω).17 Pausanias echoes his model by making similar pronouncements in his own work.18 Neither author of course shies away from championing one account over another elsewhere, or in assessing what – and who – should be considered trustworthy. ‘What is said’ is an enormous body of facts and alternative facts built up in an agonistic world in which impartial arbiters are almost impossible to find. Writers are simultaneously gatekeepers, deciding on what amongst ‘what is said’ is worthy of recording; and how they record this cannot be impartial. I have argued elsewhere that we should think of the Periēgēsis as having a topographic architecture in that it encompasses the geographical spaces

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Kowalzig 2007: 50, where the discussion is indebted to the work of Maurice Bloch. For Pausanias’ descriptions of local guides as in this passage, and his attitudes towards them, see Jones 2001. For Hippolytos’ tomb, see Hall 1999; for Mopsos’, see Hornblower 2015: 210–11. Hdt. 7.152.3. The closest echo is at Paus. 6.3.8. Note his use of the ‘writing but not believing’ trope at 2.17.4, in relation to the Argive Sanctuary of Hera.

How to Write a Local History of Imperial Greek Cults

of Greece (‘topoi’) within its written passages (‘topoi’).19 This is a deliberate attempt to take seriously the ways in which Pausanias’ words quite literally take up space. In choosing what to include, how to include it, and where to place it in his text, Pausanias is imposing order onto the physical terrain of Greece. This order emerges inevitably from the demands of his linear technology, and projects just as inevitably particular interpretative perspectives. So, in Pausanias’ description Argos seems hollowed out: because in these passages Pausanias deems so many Argive traditions insupportable and urges the reader to go elsewhere for the true account, the city appears devoid of substance even while being presented as the focus of the description. Pausanias’ itineraries carve up the Greek mainland into neat chains of cities, each encountered in turn as the linear nature of writing and reading require. And yet, topoi (as both geographical and written entities) are never walled off from one another like this. The ten books of the Periēgēsis have not merely geographical unity; many also show a fine sense of thematic focus. For example, Samuel Gartland has revealed the close relationship between Book Four, on Messenia, and Book Nine, on Boiotia.20 Pausanias’ Messeniaka is overwhelmingly the story of the region’s defeat, its struggle against Spartan rule, and its liberation and ‘refounding’ in the wake of the battle of Leuctra. His Boiōtika contains the work’s most substantial discussion of fourth-century history, in the guise of an extended biography of Epaminondas inserted into the description of Thebes.21 These books are thus caught up in the same nexus: the founding of Messene as an independent polis in 369 BCE occurred against a backdrop of shifting politics, most notably the opportunistic alignment of Boiotian interests with the ambitions of a newly agitant Messenian diaspora in the vacuum created by the defeat of the Spartans.22 As Gartland shows, these points of collaboration are evident in Pausanias’ alignment of Books Four and Nine through

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I develop the concept most fully in Delattre and Hawes 2020 and apply it to the Periēgēsis in Hawes 2017a; 2019; 2021: esp. 76–81. Gartland 2016. Hutton 2010: 424–29 suggests that all ten books form a kind of ringcomposition when viewed synoptically. He goes on (pp. 429–36) to uncover parallels between Books Four and Seven which express the theme of Hellenic freedom. Paus. 9.13.1–9.15.6. Messenian history has proved a fruitful paradigm for examining the workings of cultural memory and the construction of a coherent group identity. Luraghi 2008 offers the most substantial discussion; see also Asheri 1983; Alcock 1999; Figueira 1999; Alcock 2001. Pausanias’ fourth book is crucial to our understanding of ancient Messenia so long as we recognise that it is an Imperial view on a past constructed according to the needs of a Messenian polity actively shaping its own identify.

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numerous, often quite subtle, echoes. A case in point: Epaminondas’ biography in Book Nine ends with an epigram that elevates as his major achievement the founding of Messene alongside Megalopolis as a curb to resurgent Spartan power.23 In Book Four, Epaminondas is the central agent in the creation of Messene and the organisation of the new polity.24 In this story, however, he plays the role of patron and benefactor: he is, as befits a man described chiefly at Thebes, a Boiotian and not a transplanted Messenian. In his long description of Messene’s founding, Pausanias presents it as the revivification of a culture interrupted by the period of Spartan domination: Epaminondas built the city on the spot where Aristomenes, the hero of the Second Messenian War, had deposited sacred writings as he fled into exile, and the recovery of these is figured metaphorically as the rescue of an old woman, nearing death.25 The rites which marked the laying of the city’s foundations present it as a collaborative enterprise. They begin with each group making sacrifices to its own civic gods: the Thebans to Dionysos and Apollo Ismenios, the Argives to Hera and Nemean Zeus, and the Messenians to Zeus Ithome, the Dioscouroi, the Great Goddesses, and Kaukon.26 They then – together – call back to the region its heroes: the early rulers and their families, the Heraklids Kresphontes and Aipytos, and Aristomenes.27 This is not, then, a new city being founded, nor a colony of old Thebes being established, but rather a home being built for a people with its own – pre-existing – local traditions. One detail at the creation of this particular locale should send our minds elsewhere, to the network of interests that coincide in this moment. When the construction begins in earnest, ‘they raised the circuit of the walls, and built within it houses and sanctuaries. And they worked to the accompaniment of music, but only from Boiotian and Argive auloi; the songs of

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Paus. 9.15.6. As Gartland 2016: 86–87 notes, Thebans are mentioned in Book Four and Messenians mentioned in Book Nine more than might otherwise be expected from other sources. It is notable that, of the passages he cites, Thebans and Messenians work in collaboration in the historical period, but not in the mythical period (e.g. Paus. 4.3.4, 9.9.2, 9.9.4). Paus. 4.16.6–4.17.8. Paus. 4.26.6–8; cf. 4.20.4. For this motif discussed in its broader context, see Hutton 2010; Hawes 2018: 161–64. Of these, the Dioscouroi are normally paradigmatically Spartan figures (e.g. Hom. Il. 3.423), but Pausanias reports (uniquely) that the Messenians claimed them as their own (e.g. Paus. 3.26.2–3, 4.31.9). The Great God(desse)s were worshipped at the important Messenian cult site of Andania; Kaukon was the hero who introduced their rites there (Paus. 4.1.5, 4.2.6, 4.26.8). Paus. 4.27.6.

How to Write a Local History of Imperial Greek Cults

Sakadas and Pronomos led forth in great rivalry.’28 As Gartland notes, the scene that Epaminondas ‘stage-manages’ at Messene is rife with echoes of Pausanias’ Thebes; there the general’s statue was described in proximity to that of the aulētēs Pronomos (Sakadas’ statue was, unsurprisingly, displayed at Argos), and there too the landscape commemorated Argive antagonism through relics from the attack of the Seven and the Epigonoi.29 Pausanias declared the Argive campaign against Thebes to be ‘in my view, the most worthy of record (λόγου μάλιστα ἄξιον) of all of those in which Greek fought against Greeks during the so-called heroic age’.30 At fourth-century Messene, we find the two cities now allied, their past hostility softened into a stylised agon of musical competition. The very image of a city rising to the sound of music in any case recalls a founding myth of Thebes: Amphion moved stones to create its famous seven-gated fortifications with the power of his lyre. As Gartland notes, this story appears in the Periēgēsis at Thebes, albeit indirectly, when Pausanias recounts the narrative while noting that Homer did not include it.31 Epaminondas’ pointed concern with the city’s fortifications – a practical one in the circumstances, certainly – is likewise a point of connection between the new city and its Boiotian benefactor.32 As Gartland rightly notes, this dynamic is only fully visible when we give up on the habit of isolating individual passages from the Periēgēsis and begin reading them within the full complexity of the work. We can take Gartland’s observations further. In his lavish description of Messene’s walls, Pausanias invokes analogies to convey their full impression: The entire circuit is made of stone and there are towers and parapets built upon it. I have not myself seen the walls of Babylon, or the walls of Memnon at Susa in Persia, and nor have I heard directly from another who has; but I can say that Messene is better protected than Ambrossos in Phokis, Byzantium, and Rhodes – all extremely well-fortified places.33

28 29

30 31

32

Paus. 4.27.7. Paus. 9.12.5–6; 2.22.8–9; Gartland 2016: 87–89. On the prominence of relics from the attack of the Seven and its aftermath in Imperial Thebes, see Berman 2015; Hawes 2017b. In Pausanias’ account, Argos too highlights this event in such a way that the pair of cities seem closely tied: Musti 1988. Paus. 9.9.1. Paus. 9.5.7; Gartland 2016: 88. Pausanias in fact later describes the prominent tomb of Amphion and Zethos as having been constructed by the hero’s music: he transfers the story to this monument in part on account of the difficulty in reconciling Thebes’ two founding stories with its two circuits of walls (see Hawes 2017b: 443–46 and, for the double foundation more generally, Berman 2004). 33 Gartland 2016: 88–89. Paus. 4.31.5.

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We are now seeing Messene’s walls not as Epaminondas had them built, but as they still stood a half-millennium later, when Pausanias visited. Missing from Pausanias’ catalogue of fortified cities is Thebes; from the vantage point of Imperial Greece, that city belonged squarely in the list of cities close to ruin.34 Its seven-gated walls are the focus for Pausanias’ description of the city, and yet he never tells us what they looked like let alone praises their appearance; given its history of destruction, rebuilding and decline, we might assume that its Cyclopean stonework was largely gone. What the scene of Epaminondas at Messene captures is a particular moment in time: at that point, the auloi at Messene would trigger comparisons to Amphion constructing the walls of Thebes, or stand as symbolic reversals of the flutegirls who played as the Spartans dismantled Athens’ long walls.35 Yet mere decades later, Thebes too would be defeated and its walls pulled down. An epigram from the first century CE describes the dismantling taking place to the tune of a ‘dissonant aulos’ on Alexander’s orders, a pertinent reversal of Amphion’s wall-building music.36 This too lies as patina on the Messenian fortifications when viewed from Pausanias’ later perspective. Gartland’s observations on how the fourth and ninth books replay the intersections of Messenian and Boiotian interests in the fourth century show how the textual topography of the Periēgēsis captures traditions shared between two communities on the ground. My contribution is to note the autonomy of the reader: we may experience the auloi at Messene as capturing a specific debt to Thebes; but we may equally cast our minds further afield, and consider how Messene will in some ways replace Thebes as the impressive, fortified polis of the Greek mainland. A reader brings to Pausanias a common store of knowledge; she does not need Pausanias to remind her of Amphion’s lyre-playing to know the story. Again, we are reminded of the idiosyncrasies of localism when we take into account idiomatic perspectives: Pausanias’ control over his topoi is total; but he can only partially determine how they might resonate.

Obscured Ritual Relationships in the Architecture of the Periēgēsis We have seen that the Periēgēsis – by its very nature – collapses the distinction between topoi as written and geographical entities. Any decision 34

E.g. Paus. 8.33.1–3.

35

Xen. Hell. 2.2.23.

36

A. P. 9.216.

How to Write a Local History of Imperial Greek Cults

about where in the work a particular passage belongs is simultaneously an assessment of which location a particular tradition belongs to. Because writing is a linear activity, Pausanias’ topographic rendering of the Greek mainland is primarily hodological.37 It fixes individual locations through their geographical proximity but captures this proximity in a single dimension along an ideal route rather than relationally, using the two or three dimensions of modern cartography. We have seen that the Periēgēsis can communicate traditions that do not sit easily within regional or polis boundaries in ways that are practically invisible within Pausanias’ textual architecture. Where non-linear connections are visible is in his crossreferences. One-hundred-and-fifty-five times Pausanias sends the reader elsewhere, so two geographical topoi by means of highlighting relevant material shared between two written topoi.38 This high number of crossreferences is frequently invoked as evidence for the Periēgēsis being a carefully crafted piece of writing, and not merely a collection of observations.39 My contention is that we can also use these cross-references to show us where the cracks are, those places where Pausanias’ material does not fit neatly into his linear system of itineraries. In short, cross references become necessary where the ties between places are not merely those of regional affiliations or geographical proximity (which are easily accommodated by the periegetical structure) but draw connections further afield. In this section I present one example of how the crafting of a cross-reference colours the localistic perspective of the Periēgēsis. I then explore how ignoring such potential connections likewise serves particular narrative purposes. A notorious problem of ancient geography concerned the location of Homer’s Pylos.40 In Book Four Pausanias clearly cleaves to the majority opinion when he describes the city of the coast of Messenia as capital of the Neleiad kingdom. There he identifies various tombs and buildings associated with Nestor and his family. But note how he describes its eponymous founder: Pylon, son of Kleson founded it [i.e. Pylos in Messenia]; he brought with him from the Megarid some Lelegians who then held that area. But he

37

38 39

40

For the concept of hodological space in ancient literature, see Purves 2010, who draws in part on Janni 1984. The full list appears in Akujärvi 2005a: 60–64. They are used as evidence for Pausanias’ careful composition in Habicht 1985: 7; Moggi 1993: 402–03; Elsner 2001: 5–6; Hutton 2005: 17; Pretzler 2007: 6–8; Hutton 2010: 425. See Allen 1921: 75–79; Hope Simpson and Lazenby 1970: 82; Visser 1997: 522–31.

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didn’t rule for long: he was expelled by Neleus and the Pelasgians from Iolkos. After he left he crossed over into the next territory and settled in Pylos in Elis.41

The salient features of Pylon’s migration are covered once more when Pausanias’ account reaches Pylos in Elis: ‘The ruins of Pylos in Elis are obvious along the mountain road between Olympia and Elis . . . A Megarian, Pylon, son of Kleson, founded this city, as I have already said. It was destroyed by Herakles.’42 Pausanias’ reminder of the Book Four material here acts as a cross reference. It highlights the way in which Pylon (the eponym) is shared collaboratively between these two communities: to Messenia belongs the story of his departure; to Elis the tradition that he arrived.43 This presentation is notable, not least because the two Pyloi can so easily be treated as duplicates, rivals for the same reputation. Strabo, for example, describes the Eleians producing placenames in their territory to explain Nestor’s epithet ‘Gerenian’ (cf. the Messenian city ‘Gerenia’) and the Messenians claiming that their River Pamisos was once known as the Alpheios.44 Pausanias’ account, far from suggesting that one location falsely claims Homeric kleos, divides the tradition between them: The Eleians say that in a passage of Homer there is a reference to this Pylos: ‘And he was descended from the river / Alpheios, whose broad stream flows through the land of the Pylians.’45 And I found their account persuasive: the Alpheios does indeed flow through this region and so the passage cannot be referring to any other Pylos. The Alpheios cannot – by its very nature – flow through the land of the Pylians by Sphakteria [i.e. in Messenia] and I know of no place in Arkadia called Pylos back then.46

Pausanias’ conciliatory and even-handed approach to describing these two cities downplays the potential antagonism between them by allowing each to put forward its strongest claims to Homeric acknowledgement while suppressing the extent to which their claims conflict. Messenian Pylos is ‘sandy Pylos’; Eleian Pylos is what Homer has in mind when he describes the Alpheios flowing nearby. The payback for this approach comes when we recognise the damage done on the ground by a dogmatic Homeric exegesis which would assess the correctness of the landscape only by the details of Iliadic passages. If Pausanias were to deny that Messenian Pylos 41 43

44

42 Paus. 4.36.1. Paus. 6.22.5. Apollodoros, calling him ‘Pylas’, gives us the story of his founding Pylos after being expelled from Megara (Apollod. Bibl. 3.15.5). The idea that he founded two cities called Pylos is seemingly unique to Pausanias. 45 46 Paus. 7.3.1, 7. Cited from Hom. Il. 5.544–45. Paus. 6.22.6.

How to Write a Local History of Imperial Greek Cults

was the homeland of the Neleiads, then he would be arguing against both the Panhellenic tradition that recognised Nestor as a Messenian from at least the fifth century and the importance of Neleus and Nestor within Messenia as ancient heroes of the newly established Hellenistic polity.47 Most crucially, he would be undercutting the cultic landscape of Pylos, where prominent relics – Nestor’s house and his tomb; the tomb of his son Thrasymedes; the cave where Neleus kept his cattle – attest that this family belongs at this place.48 In short, for these landmarks to be as the Messenians say they are, Pausanias must underplay the arguments which would weaken Messenian Pylos’ claim to be the Homeric ‘city of Neleus’. On the other side of the border, by contrast, the authenticity of Eleian cult requires that Pausanias not allow the Messenians to overstep their part of the tradition in Book Four. By agreeing that when Homer situates the Pylians on the Alpheios he is describing Elis, he preserves what is distinctive about the cultic landscape there too. In Book Six the payback comes at the city of Elis several chapters after the itinerary encounters the ruins of Pylos: The Sanctuary of Hades and its temple (for the Eleians indeed have such things – a Sanctuary of Hades and a temple) is opened just once a year . . . The Eleians are the only people I know of who worship Hades, and it is for this reason. They say that when Herakles led a campaign against Eleian Pylos, Athena came with him as an ally. Hades came to aid the Pylians both because he hated Herakles, and because the Pylians honoured him. Evidence is produced from Homer, who says in the Iliad – ‘Amongst them, huge Hades was wounded by a swift arrow / when that man, son of Zeus who bears the aigis, / shot at him at Pylos amongst the dead (ἐν Πύλῳ ἐν νεκύεσσι), and gave to him great pains.’49 If, according to Homer’s account, Poseidon was allied to the Greeks during Agamemnon and Menelaos’ campaign against Troy, then it would not be beyond the realm of possibility for the same poet to think that Hades gave aid to the Pylians. In any case, the Eleians made a sanctuary for the god since he was a friend to them, and an enemy of Herakles.50

Pausanias’ curiosity at the strange phenomenon of a sanctuary dedicated to the god of the underworld is palpable. The Eleian explanation makes sense of the brief notice earlier that Herakles had destroyed (Eleian) Pylos.51 It rests upon their expansion of a strange reference to a theomachy in Iliad Five. But whereas ancient commentators often connected that story to 47 49

48 E.g. Pind. Pyth. 6.32–36; Paus. 4.31.11. Paus. 4.36.1–5. 50 51 Cited from Hom. Il. 5.395–97. Paus. 6.25.3. Paus. 6.22.6.

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another story of Heraklean bloodshed at Pylos – Nestor’s report in Iliad Eleven that all his brothers were killed in a raid on their kingdom – in Pausanias’ Elis these ties are left unexplored.52 To gather together at Eleian Pylos such hints would be to messy the question of the location of the city of Neleus, a question that Pausanias has so carefully circumvented. Pausanias’ respectful treatment of Messenian traditions is apparent throughout Book Four. In large part, this rests on the connections that he does not make. So, whereas at Epidauros he describes the idea that Asklepios was a Messenian as the ‘furthest from the truth’ and created by Hesiod merely ‘to please the Messenians’, and in Arkadia he dismisses the idea of an Arkadian origin for the healing god by referring the reader back to his Epidaurean discussion, in Messenia itself, he adopts the tradition which made the Messenian heroine Asklepios’ mother.53 Nowhere does he cross-reference the alternative traditions; in short, Messenia exists within the Periēgēsis as a self-contained topos with its own internal logic and its own readings of past traditions. Quite unlike the case of the two Pyloi, where Pausanias describes the places as if the Messenians and the Eleians worked collaboratively on a shared compromise, the Messenian claim to Asklepios is an either/or proposition. Their version of the healing god was not a wandering figure, but a wholly Messenian one, and within the boundaries of Book Four, Pausanias holds to this by not introducing the conventional knowledge that would undercut it. This dogmatic understanding of Messenian primacy then colours how Pausanias describes the resulting cult. The Asklepeion at Gerenia would be seemingly a minor location in the grand scheme of things. Healing sanctuaries proliferated from the early Hellenistic period with a kind of hierarchy establishing itself: those in Thessaly, Epidauros, and Kos were considered especially close to the god. When Strabo describes the sanctuary in Gerenia, he characterises it as a copy of the Asklepeion at Trikka in Thessaly (ἀφίδρυμα τοῦ ἐν τῇ Θετταλικῇ Τρίκκῃ).54 Pausanias, by contrast, never adopts this language of calques in relation to the Messenian claims to the god. He says nothing of the connection to Thessalian Trikka in his topos dedicated to Gerenia. His account, for all its seeming discursive exactitude, avoids the question of 52

53

For ancient attempts to explain the story of Herakles wounding Hades, see Kirk 1990 s.v. Hades or Herakles, 396–97; Fowler 2013: 303–05. Note that Panyassis (F 26) has the same arrangement, i.e. that the wounding of Hades occurs specifically at the Eleian location. The variant reading of ἐν πύλῳ ἐν νεκύεσσι as referring to a battle at the gates of the underworld (vel sim.) must in any case have strengthened the attractiveness of this passage’s aetiological logic in the context of a sanctuary of Hades. 54 Paus. 2.26.7; 8.25.11. Strabo 8.4.4.

How to Write a Local History of Imperial Greek Cults

Thessalian influence altogether: within the Messenian worldview, ‘Trikka’ was in any case a place in their hinterland.55 What captures his attention at Gerenia is in fact the presence there of a tomb of his son Machaeon, and the story which explains how his body was transported back from Troy.56 Without a Thessalian claim to possess the body of this (originally) Thessalian hero, in Pausanias’ account at least, the Messenians have the field to themselves. What, then, of Elis? Which are the traditions there that Pausanias does not make more of? His argument that the two Pyloi might share tidily amongst themselves the Homeric fame of their toponym is, as we have seen by comparison with Strabo’s treatment of the issue, a quite partial presentation of what might have been a more lively controversy on the ground, particularly north of the border. What Pausanias gives us in fact are some suggestions that there were pieces of evidence – beyond merely the location of the Alpheios and the existence of Hades’ cult that Pausanias does grant them – that might support the Elian claim to possession. In describing the early history of Olympia, for example, he catalogues the heroes who held games there.57 These form a kind of succession for Elian kings; that Neleus appears in it suggests that he is being thought of as ruler of Triphylian Pylos, and not the Messenian one that Pausanias elsewhere insists be meant by the phrase ‘city of Neleus’.58 That Pausanias makes nothing of this connection is instructive. The tradition (‘what is said’) is passed on; its geographical implications – presumably crucial to its epichoric significance – are left unstated.

Conclusion Appreciating the Periēgēsis as a holistic artefact of Imperial literature and not merely a collation of passages to be mined for useful content is one of the major accomplishments of this recent burst of interest in it. It is an archive, certainly, but an archive with its own topographical perspectives. To say, for example, that Pausanias rejects the story of Asklepios’ Messenian origins on the basis of an eye-catching comment at Epidauros in book two is to miss the specific work that this alternative tradition does two books later as the foundations for a whole series of Messenian claims to

55 58

56 57 Paus. 4.3.2. Paus. 3.26.9–10. Paus. 5.8.1–5. I thank Scott Smith for pointing out this implication of the passage to me.

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cultic primacy.59 What Pausanias says about ‘what is said’ must thus be considered broadly alongside both how and where he says it. Pausanias’ localism is in the end an artificial one, filtered through the linear rigours of writing and the rhetorical conventions of ancient prose. That said, it has much to teach us about the dynamics of local cult. Unstated in Pausanias are those shared assumptions that underpinned Hellenic ritual: the central importance of place, the primacy of authenticity, the fact of cultural difference, and the idea that these differences can be comprehended by stories which are almost invariably just variations on a core set of aetiological templates. This is one aspect of the shared tradition that holds it all together; another is the inevitability of disagreement. Disputes over local phenomena are foundational; shared traditions require that epichoric communities press their own advantage such that their contestation both creates knowledge and attests the very real preservative powers of chauvinism. Where Pausanias weighs in on these disputes, we might be tempted to agree that a matter is settled. His narrative structure, the connections that he draws or does not draw, what he gives space to and what he refuses space: these all naturally colour what we take from him. But this would deny the very real local dynamics at play. At Epidauros Asklepios is son of Koronis, and born in their territory. At Gerenia, the god is a Messenian and father to Machaeon now buried in their land. And in Arkadia, the rituals performed at the Sanctuary of Asklepios Pais (‘the child’) attest undeniably the god’s attachment there. Pausanian logic presumably makes little headway when faced with epichoric knowledge born out of the everyday habits of cultic performance. The connections made and the connections denied are fundamentally shaped by perspective. There is no disembodied, disinterested observer of the local. The Periēgēsis makes the view from the mainland the normal one: ‘all Greek things’ begins with Athens, reaches a mid-point with Olympia, and finishes up just beyond Delphi. This is, largely, the range of Pausanias’ material, and the extent of his cross-references. Our understanding of ancient cult is all the richer for the survival of Pausanias’ account of Messenia, an otherwise poorly documented region. But what concept of Asklepian cult would emerge from the Periēgēsis if it were to have taken in also Thessaly, Kos, and Pergamon? Where might the mind of a visitor from Transalpine Gaul go as he entered the sanctuary at Epidauros? Pausanias offers us a glimpse of this dynamic at work: his silencing of the Argives in 59

E.g. Fowler 2013: 76: ‘Pausanias does not credit this version, regarding it as invented to gratify the Messenians; he is probably right.’

How to Write a Local History of Imperial Greek Cults

their claim to possess the tombs of Deianeira and Helenos (quoted above) is of a piece with his denial that they had one for Tantalos the father of Pelops: he was definitely buried in Pausanias’ homeland in Lydia.60 Pausanias’ personal attachments make him inclined to offer up particular traditions, notice particular connections, and judge authenticity according to his particular ways. The specifics of his chauvinism may be his own, but the general idea – that cults make sense to their epichoric participants, and that they belong within a shared culture even when their exact logic can be demolished – applies broadly. Bibliography Akujärvi, J. (2005) Researcher, Traveller, Narrator. Studies in Pausanias’ Periegesis. Stockholm. Alcock, S. E. (1999) ‘The Pseudo-history of Messenia Unplugged’, Transactions of the American Philological Association 129, 333–41. (2001) ‘The Peculiar Book IV and the Problem of the Messenian Past’, in S. E. Alcock, J. F. Cherry and J. Elsner (eds.) Pausanias: Travel and Memory in Roman Greece. Oxford, 142–53. Allen, T. W. (1921) The Homeric Catalogue of Ships. Oxford. Asheri, D. (1983) ‘La diaspora e il ritorno dei Messeni’, in E. Gabba (ed.) Tria Corda. Como, 27–42. Barker, E., A. Foka and K. Konstantinidou (2020) ‘Coding for the Many, Transforming Knowledge for All: Annotating Digital Documents’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 135, 195–202. Beck, H. (2020) Localism and the Ancient Greek City-State. Chicago, Ill. and London. Berman, D. W. (2004) ‘The Double Foundation of Boiotian Thebes’, Transactions of the American Philological Association 134, 1–22. (2015) Myth, Literature, and the Creation of the Topography of Thebes. Cambridge. Delattre, C. and G. Hawes (2020) ‘Mythographical Topography, Textual Materiality and the (Dis)ordering of Myth: The Case of Antoninus Liberalis’, The Journal of Hellenic Studies 140, 106–19. Elsner, J. (2001) ‘Structuring “Greece”: Pausanias’s Periegesis as a Literary Construct’, in S. E. Alcock, J. F. Cherry and J. Elsner (eds.) Pausanias: Travel and Memory in Roman Greece. Oxford, 3–20. Figueira, T. J. (1999) ‘The Evolution of the Messenian Identity’, in S. Hodkinson and A. Powell (eds.) Sparta: New Perspectives. London, 211–42. Fowler, R. L. (2013) Early Greek Mythography 2. Oxford. 60

Paus. 2.22.3.

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  Gartland, S. D. (2016) ‘Enchanting History: Pausanias in Fourth-Century Boiotia’, in S. D. Gartland (ed.) Boiotia in the Fourth Century B.C. Philadelphia, Pa., 80–98. Habicht, C. (1985) Pausanias’ Guide to Ancient Greece. Berkeley, Calif., Los Angeles, Calif., and London. Hall, J. M. (1999) ‘Beyond the Polis: The Multilocality of Heroes’, in R. Hägg (ed.) Ancient Greek Hero Cult. Stockholm, 49–59. Hawes, G. (2017a) ‘Two Tombs for Hyrnetho: A Case Study in Localism and Mythographic Topography’, Center for Hellenic Studies Research Bulletin 5(2). (2017b) ‘Stones, Names, Stories, and Bodies: Pausanias before the Gates of Seven-Gated Thebes’, in J. McInerney and I. Sluiter (eds.) Landscapes of Value: Natural Environment and Cultural Imagination in Classical Antiquity. Leiden, 431–57. (2018) ‘Pausanias’ Messenian Itinerary and the Journeys of the Past’, in C. Breytenbach and C. Feralla (eds.) Paths of Knowledge in Antiquity. Berlin, 151–75. (2019) ‘The Mythographical Topography of Pausanias’ Periegesis’, in J. Marincola and A. Romano (eds.) Host or Parasite? Mythographers and their Contemporaries. Berlin, 135–52. (2021) Pausanias in the World of Greek Myth. Oxford. Hope Simpson, R. and J. F. Lazenby (1970) The Catalogue of the Ships in Homer’s Iliad. Oxford. Hornblower, S. (2015) Lycophron, Alexandra: Greek Text, Translation, Commentary, and Introduction. Oxford. Hutton, W. (2005) Describing Greece: Landscape and Literature in the Periegesis of Pausanias. Cambridge. (2010) ‘Pausanias and the Mysteries of Hellas’, Transactions of the American Philological Association 140, 423–59. Janni, P. (1984) La mappa e il periplo: cartografia antica e spazio odologico. Rome. Jones, C. P. (2001) ‘Pausanias and His Guides’, in S. E. Alcock, J. F. Cherry and J. Elsner (eds.) Pausanias: Travel and Memory in Roman Greece. Oxford, 33–39. Kirk, G. S. (1990) The Iliad: A Commentary II. Cambridge. Kowalzig, B. (2007) Singing for the Gods: Performances of Myth and Ritual in Archaic and Classical Greece. Oxford. Larson, J. L. (2016) Understanding Greek Religion: A Cognitive Approach. Abingdon and New York, N.Y. Luraghi, N. (2008) The Ancient Messenians: Constructions of Ethnicity and Memory. Cambridge. Moggi, M. (1993) ‘Scrittura e riscrittura della storia in Pausania’, Rivista di filologia e di istruzione classica 121, 396–418.

How to Write a Local History of Imperial Greek Cults Musti, D. (1988) ‘La struttura del libro di Pausania sulla Beozia’, Επετηρίς Της Εταρείας Βοιωτικών Μελετών 1, 333–44. Pirenne-Delforge, V. (2008) Retour à la source: Pausanias et la religion grecque. Liège. Pretzler, M. (2007) Pausanias: Travel Writing in Ancient Greece. London. Purves, A. (2010) Space and Time in Ancient Greek Narrative. Cambridge. Rimell, V. (2017) ‘You Are Here: Encounters in Imperial Space’, in V. Rimell and M. Asper (eds.) Imagining Empire: Political Space in Hellenistic and Roman Literature. Heidelberg, 1–10. Taylor, C. and K. Vlassopoulos (2015) ‘Introduction: An Agenda for the Study of Greek History’, in C. Taylor and K. Vlassopoulos (eds.) Communities and Networks in the Ancient Greek World. Oxford, 1–36. Visser, E. (1997) Homers Katalog der Schiffe. Stuttgart and Leipzig.

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Panhellenic Sanctuaries: Local and Regional Perspectives  

This final chapter targets the local horizon of sanctuaries whose scope and spheres of influence transcended the local. Variously labelled as regional or Panhellenic sanctuaries, Peter Funke’s programmatic contribution challenges the implicit dichotomy between these descriptors and the local. He begins with the observation that religious conduct in the polis was always subject to diverse spatial dynamics, articulated, for instance, in the different reach of urban and liminal cult sites. A similar spatial and functional diversification is pitched for Panhellenic sites. Rather than being elusive or purely notional, Panhellenic perspectives manifested themselves in the evocation of Greek gods and in cult practices that were considered genuinely Hellenic in nature; the intertwinement of Greek religion with the notion of being Greek has surfaced in other instances in this volume already and is reinvigorated here. As shared points of reference, Panhellenic commodities were not only commonly accepted by the Greeks but, in fact, they were substantiated through hardwired regulations that assured availability to all. Peter Funke discusses various literary sources that attest to such assertions. He lists cult places, oracles and healing sites, the tight-meshed distribution of which across Greece made Panhellenic reverence practically possible. In conclusion, a cursory glance at Dodona, Delphi, and the Athenian Panathenaic festival places Panhellenic manifestations into the sacred landscape of ancient Greece.

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It may initially seem rather strange to think about local and regional dimensions of Panhellenic sanctuaries. However, such a perspective is by no means a contradictio in se. On the contrary, there was a unique interrelation between the different spatial dimensions. Therefore, I would like to focus my enquiry into local horizons of ancient Greek religion on the question of how these horizons can be identified and analysed in Greek sanctuaries, whose spheres of influence extend beyond a locally limited region ‒ sanctuaries which are generally referred to by scholars as ‘transregional’ or ‘Panhellenic’. Such designations are, however, only of limited use in describing these cult places as part of the larger range of Greek sanctuaries. For the fact that these sanctuaries were shaped by a tension between the local sphere on the one hand and regional/universal, or Panhellenic,

Panhellenic Sanctuaries

paradigms on the other all too often eludes scholarly attention. These sanctuaries could exert their influence on several entirely distinct spheres simultaneously. Consequently, they cannot be reduced to a single paradigm. The aim should be, therefore, to develop criteria for an adequate description of the multidimensional nature of these sanctuaries. The following considerations are to be understood as the first steps in this direction.1 I would like to begin my enquiry with Herodotus’ famous story of the foundation of the Sanctuary of Zeus at Dodona: two black doves had flown from Egyptian Thebes to the Siwa Oasis in Libya and Dodona in Epeiros, which initiated the foundation of these oracular sites. This event linked the famous oracle sites at the far edges of the Greek world.2 Geographically, a wider gap could hardly have been bridged to describe the network of relationships between these sanctuaries and the spatial extent of the cultic Greek oikoumene. This was, however, a cultic oikoumene, which comprised more than the sum of a myriad of temples and cult places. It also encompassed individual sanctuaries whose influence extended far beyond a narrow local sphere and that were also held in high regard in the non-Greek world. Many efforts have been made to place the diversity of sanctuaries and cults in well-defined categories.3 However, these attempts have often been based on a rigid dichotomy between polis sanctuaries, on the one hand, and ill-defined transregional ‒ often referred to synonymously as Panhellenic ‒ sanctuaries, on the other. In the following, I will attempt to propose a more nuanced alternative to this approach. I will proceed in three steps. First, I will describe the polis-centred and Panhellenic dimensions of Greek religion. Even though I can assume much of this to be well known, I need an outline of these two dimensions, for it will serve as a backdrop to my third step. I will try to undertake a functional differentiation of transregional sanctuaries and cults and to arrive at a new understanding of their local, regional, and transregional perspectives. I cannot, however, claim to offer fully developed solutions. What I am offering here are preliminary ideas, which will have to be further substantiated.

1

2 3

This article provisionally takes stock of my research into transregional sanctuaries in ancient Greece, which I began within the framework of the Collaborative Research Centre ‘Functions of Religion in Ancient Societies’ and have continued to develop within the Cluster of Excellence ‘Religion and Politics in Pre-Modern and Modern Cultures’. See in detail Funke 2006; 2009; 2014. Hdt. 2.55. Cf. Burkert 1985: 124–25; Nesselrath 1999; Bichler 2001: 174–76. Cf. e.g. (with further literature) Marinatos and Hägg 1993; Alcock and Osborne 1994; Rüpke 1999; Sourvinou-Inwood 2000a; Scott 2009; Linke 2014: 32–35.

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The Polis-Centred Dimensions I will begin with the polis-centred dimensions, in which I would also like to include the ethne. Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood has repeatedly maintained that Greek religion was primarily polis-religion: ‘The polis provided the fundamental framework in which Greek religion operated . . . The Greek polis articulated religion and was itself articulated by it; religion became the polis’ central ideology.’4 Doubtless, religion and cult were also, but by no means exclusively an immediate reflection of the political system of the Greek polis-world, and its manifestations were consequently characterised by a corresponding diversity. It is well known that every polis and every ethnos had their own central sanctuaries, festivals, and cultic calendars, which were a decisive factor in maintaining the social cohesion of the respective citizen bodies. These institutions were an integral part of political identity, which was firmly rooted in religion. In this context, it suffices to point to Francois de Polignac’s study on cults, territory, and the origins of the Greek polis, in which he uses the term ‘religious bipolarity’ to describe the role of sanctuaries in the Greek poleis, thereby identifying a twofold function of the cult places within the poleis. On the one hand, they constituted the social space within the polis for the citizen body. On the other hand, the establishment of border sanctuaries served to define permanently the territory of the polis and consequently to delineate it against the surrounding polis territories which were defined in the same way.5 What de Polignac elucidates in his book not only finds ample support in the archaeological record but also finds a theoretical counterpart in the sixth book of Plato’s Laws. After a long description of the ideal state, Plato also addresses the architectural layout of the polis: ‘It would seem that our city, being new and houseless hitherto, must provide for practically the whole of its house-building, arranging all the details of its architecture, including temples and walls.’ He then continues by addressing the construction of sanctuaries: ‘The temples we must erect all round the marketplace, and in a circle round the whole city, on the highest spots.’6 Sanctuaries around the market as integrative factors and cult places on the highest points around the city as demarcations: a more concise description of de Polignac’s concept of ‘religious bipolarity’ can hardly be

4

5 6

Sourvinou-Inwood 2000a: 13; see also Sourvinou-Inwood 2000b; Cole 1995; Parker 1996; Schmitt-Pantel 1990; Woolf 1997. See the contribution of Julia Kindt to this volume, Chapter 1. de Polignac 1995: esp. 81–88; see also de Polignac 2009: esp. 434–39. Pl. Leg. 778b–c, transl. R. G. Bury.

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imagined. The importance of Greek religion as polis religion for the formation of identity is most evident in this case. Nonetheless, it would be one-sided to view Greek religion solely through the lens of a polis- and ethnos- centred perspective. Julia Kindt has emphatically pointed to this. She has rightfully called into question the fixation on poleis and ethne as the sole focal points of religious practice and has called for the integration of polis religion into a more complex religious system.7 Religion was also a decisive factor for the formation of identity in the sub-polis and sub-ethne levels of Greek society. On a sub-polis level, it may suffice to point to an example of the cults of the phylai and phratriai in Athens. While metics as a special group of strangers (xenoi) could participate in some cults on a polis level at Athens, they were categorically barred from the cults and sanctuaries of the phylai and phratriai. On this level of polis-life, they became xenoi. However, citizens of Athens who did not belong to the respective phylē and phratriai were also considered to be outsiders and quasi strangers ‒ in the sense of being different.8 These are also religious spheres that can only inadequately be subsumed under the heading ‘polis religion’. It is not my intention to elaborate further on the religious dimensions of the sub-polis level. I merely referred to it to indicate the multifaceted nature and the complexity of my research question. In the following, I will focus on the levels above the poleis and ethne and will restrict myself to the Greek state, leaving aside the global perspective, meaning the view beyond the edges of the Greek world.

Beyond the Poleis and the Ethne: The Panhellenic Perspective The point of departure for my investigation is the observation that ancient sources on the history of the world of the Greek city-states, in spite of all heterogeneity in politicis, but also in religiosis, allow us to identify a Panhellenic perspective which was significant for Greek religious thought. The Panhellenic perspective manifested itself most explicitly in cases where the emphasis was placed on evoking a sense of community amongst, and unity of, the Greeks. Accordingly, Aristagoras of Miletos could evoke the ‘gods of the Hellenes’ (θεοὶ Ἑλλήνιοι) just as the Corinthian Soklees and the

7 8

Kindt 2009; 2012: esp. 12–35; see also Beck 2020: esp. 121–60. Humphreys 2018: esp. 2.537–771 (with references and further literature).

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Athenian Hippias could.9 In 480 BCE, the Athenians rejected the Persian peace offer because they feared ‘Zeus of Hellas’ (Ζεὺς Ἑλλήνιος), and Hegesistratos of Samos encouraged the Greeks in Delos in 479 BCE to continue their fight against the Persians ‘in the name of their common gods’ (θεοὶ κοινοί).10 This Panhellenic perspective on the Greek pantheon was one of the main prerequisites for the formation of something akin to a ‘sacred landscape’ with a Panhellenic orientation, which was grounded in a poliscentred religious world but exhibited a Panhellenic character that transcended the polis. The θεοὶ Ἑλλήνιοι were placed in a world of sanctuaries whose locations were determined by a shared religious identity between the Greeks. The specific quality that held this world together was Panhellenic acceptance and ‒ as the other side of the coin ‒ Panhellenic availability. Notwithstanding the administrative responsibilities of individual poleis, ethne or amphictyonies, these sanctuaries were viewed by the Greeks as Panhellenic common ‘property’. This perception is already evident in a speech passed down by Herodotus, in which the Athenians evoke the unity of the Greeks against the backdrop of the threat posed by the Persians in the winter of 480/479 BCE. They emphatically assert that they will not become traitors of the common Greek cause (τὸ Ἑλληνικόν). What τὸ Ἑλληνικόν refers to is then further elaborated upon by the Athenians. Apart from sharing the same blood and a common language, they particularly highlight shared sanctuaries and sacrifices (θεῶν ἱδρύματά τε κοινὰ καὶ θυσίαι) as Panhellenic customs.11 The first clause of the Peace of Nicias of 421 BCE probably refers to the same sanctuaries when it states: ‘As for the common temples (περὶ μὲν τῶν ἱερῶν τῶν κοινῶν), any one who pleases may sacrifice in them and travel to them and consult the oracles in them and visit them as sacred delegates, according to ancestral custom, both by land and sea, without fear.’12 Even though this agreement must be seen in the context of the confrontation between Athens and Sparta over the control of Delphi, the phrase περὶ μὲν τῶν ἱερῶν τῶν κοινῶν still indicates that it refers to a larger number of sanctuaries, especially considering that Delphi is then singled out again in the second clause where additional provisions for this sanctuary are

9 11

12

10 Aristagoras: Hdt. 5.49.3; Soklees: Hdt. 5.92E.5; Hippias: Hdt. 5.93.1. Hdt. 9.7a.2; 9.90.2. Hdt. 8.144.2; cf. Parker 1998; Konstan 2001; Hall 2002: 189–204; Mitchell 2015; Zacharia 2008. See also the contribution of Hans Beck to this volume, Chapter 2. Thuc. 5.18.2, transl. S. Hornblower; cf. also Hornblower 1996: 471–72.

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stipulated. Consequently, the first clause obviously constitutes nothing less than the proclamation of the guarantee of the special protections of sanctuaries, which all Greeks regarded as having special significance. It is noteworthy that, as in the quoted speech by the Athenians, the phrase τὰ ἱερὰ τὰ κοινά required no further comment to clarify which specific sanctuaries were meant by it, despite the fact that its use in a contract would have called for such a precise formulation. On this issue, there seems to have existed a common consensus that was self-evident and sacrosanct for contemporary Greeks. This fact can be further substantiated through a largely neglected passage from the so-called Dissoi Logoi, an anonymous philosophical treatise from the early fourth century BCE.13 Among other things, the question of how to distinguish between justice and injustice is discussed. In this context, the example of temple robbery is intended to demonstrate that under certain circumstances a sacrilege can also be a just act. Under the headword ‘temple robbery’ (ἱεροσυλεῖν), it says: I am excluding those temples which are the private possessions of particular cities (τὰ μὲν ἴδια τῶν πόλεων); but is it not just to take and use for war-purpose those temples which are the public property of Greece (τὰ δὲ κοινὰ τᾶς Ἑλλάδος) – those of Delphi and Olympia –, if the foreign (‘barbarian’) invader is on the point of capturing Greece, and if preservation depends on money?’14

Alluding to the Persian wars, it is argued that in the event of an external threat to the whole of Greece, it is justified to use the financial assets of sanctuaries such as Delphi and Olympia, as they are jointly owned by all Greeks. The juxtaposition of τὰ [ἱερὰ] μὲν ἴδια τῶν πόλεων and τὰ [ἱερὰ] δὲ κοινὰ τᾶς Ἑλλάδος is a striking confirmation of the notion, deeply ingrained in Greek thought, of a special group of sanctuaries, which were perceived as Panhellenic, and which were elevated above the myriad of polis-cults. I have gone into these sources to demonstrate that the concept of τὰ ἱερὰ τὰ κοινά in Classical Greece was not merely based on a more-or-less diffuse emotional perception, but was indeed very concretely associated with specific sanctuaries which in their sum formed a ‘sacred landscape’ and which were as such inscribed into a mental map inside the Greeks’ minds. Apart from the sites of the Panhellenic Games, these sanctuaries were mainly dedicated to oracle and healing cults; but mystery cults such as the ones in Eleusis and Samothrace were also very probably part of this

13 14

Robinson 1979; Becker and Scholz 2004 (with further literature). Dissoi Logoi 3.8 (= DK II 90.3.8; transl. Robinson 1979: 118–19).

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group ‒ to name but a few examples.15 These cult places spanned the Greek city-state world like a net, interconnected and closely interwoven. They became fixed points of regular interactions between all Hellenes through their cults, rituals and festivals, and were therefore much more than mere elements of a ‘sacred landscape’. They constituted points of reference on a Panhellenic landscape, which was reshaped time and time again, and whose boundaries were consequently rather fluid. What can be gleaned from this admittedly rather rough outline of the polis-centred and Panhellenic dimensions for our question of local and regional perspectives of transregional cult places? To answer this question adequately, a more precise differentiation is called for. Usually, all of these sanctuaries are subsumed under the heading ‘Panhellenic’; and I have endeavoured to elucidate that the Panhellenic dimension was most certainly a specific characteristic of these cult places. However, this Panhellenic focus results in the construction of an overly strong dichotomy between these sites and the ones that I have addressed in the first part of my chapter in relation to polis-religion. It is indeed not enough to assert, following Sourvinou-Inwood, that ‘each polis was a religious system, which formed part of the more complex world-of-thepolis system, interacting with the religious systems of the other poleis and with the Panhellenic religious dimension’.16 Such a dichotomisation obscures the possible diversity of functions served by cults and sanctuaries. For just as there existed within polis-religion (but also in cults on a subpolis level) a large number of religious manifestations in the guise of dynastic, familial and individual cults, there is also ‒ on a level beyond the polis ‒ a wide spectrum of spatially and functionally diverse spheres of influence and areas of impact of ‘supra-polis’-sanctuaries, which cannot be adequately defined by the term ‘Panhellenic’ or ‘transregional’.

Different, but Entangled Spheres Instead, it seems more appropriate not to operate rashly with terms like ‘Panhellenic’ or ‘supra-polis cult’. Terms such as ‘local’, ‘regional’, and ‘transregional’ could likewise prove too diffuse for an adequate description. First, the different spheres of influence and areas of impact of each

15

See also Funke 2004; 2005.

16

Sourvinou-Inwood 2000a: 13.

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sanctuary have to be more precisely identified and differentiated by their respective spatial scope as well as their functions. An array of factors may serve as criteria for such a spatial and functional differentiation of sanctuaries. As possible examples, it may suffice to name a few criteria: origins and typology of dedications, the geographic distribution of asylia decrees, the spatial extent of the acceptance of a declared peacetime (ἐκεχειρία) in the context of sacred festivals, the distribution of seats in Amphictyonic councils, the origins of the manumission inscriptions in sanctuaries, the origins of oracle enquiries ‒ and many more.17 Access restrictions can also serve as indicators for the characterisation and typological differentiation of (not only) transregional sanctuaries and cults. We know countless rules and regulations restricting the access of certain groups and individuals to individual sanctuaries and cults on specific grounds. In this context, it may suffice to remember ‒ to name just a few examples ‒ the exclusion of Thebans from the consultation of the Oracle of Amphiaraos, or the prohibition of Dorians to enter the temple of Athena on the Athenian Acropolis or to participate in the cult for Demeter and Kore. There were sanctuaries and cults open exclusively to either women or men; entering other sanctuaries was prohibited to foreigners. This list could easily be extended.18 Even though such taboos were mostly confined to individual cases, they are indicative of specific features and characteristics of sanctuaries. Above, I have only very selectively named the criteria for spatial and functional differentiation of sanctuaries and cults. Admittedly, this compilation is quite arbitrary and still unsystematic. It was only meant to demonstrate the possible range of criteria. With the help of those criteria, we can identify partly overlapping spheres of influence and the areas of impact of entirely different dimensions. These will in turn enable us to describe the functional and spatial multidimensionality of sanctuaries and cults. Such an analysis does, however, also entail certain problems, particularly when it comes to the interpretation of archaeological findings. Neither the identification of an object nor the identification of its provenance alone can allow us to draw reliable conclusions about the functional and spatial dimensions of the spheres of influence and areas of impact of a sanctuary. Not every 17

18

See e.g. Kilian-Dirlmeier 1985 (dedications); Knäpper 2018 (asylia decrees); Theotikou 2013 (ekecheiria); Funke 2013 (amphictyonies); Lepke 2017 (manumissions); Moustakis 2006 (oracle enquiries). Further descriptions of the multidimensional nature of sanctuaries are needed in order to develop new interpretative patterns on this basis. Cf. e.g. Nilsson 1957: 75–77; see also Krauter 2004: esp. 53–113; Funke 2006; Naerebout 2009; Parker 1998.

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artefact from Asia Minor, Sicily, or the Levant that is found in a sanctuary on the Greek mainland can be used as an indicator for a ‘Panhellenic’ or even ‒ in ancient terms ‒ ‘global’ dimension.19 In this context, further development and implementation of specific methods that rely on quantitative as well as qualitative analyses are required to arrive at appropriate conclusions. Only by using this approach can we fully appreciate that a single sanctuary can simultaneously exert influence and have an impact on a local and regional level, as well as on a supra-regional and Panhellenic scale, and even beyond that into the non-Greek world. This influence was neither arbitrary nor present in every case. Functionality and spatial dimensions were rather in a dialectic relationship, whose preconditions and framework have to be identified on a case-by-case basis. Finally, I would like to demonstrate this, at least to some extent, in three small case studies. For my first case study, I have chosen the previously mentioned Sanctuary of Zeus at Dodona in Epirus. On a local level, this cult place functioned as an important religious and political centre for the surrounding tribes and, subsequently, also the Molossian kingdom and the Epirote League.20 However, as I pointed out earlier, Herodotus’ foundation myth of the Zeus-oracle also depicts the sanctuary as an integral part of a Panhellenic sacred landscape. In this context, the Zeus Sanctuary is integrated into the cultic oikoumene of the entire Greek city-state world. Yet we gain a different perspective when analysing the thousands of oracular tablets which have been unearthed during the excavations in Dodona and investigating where the people who consulted the oracle came from. The analysis of this unique and vast collection of epigraphical sources shows that the catchment area of the oracle site was geographically limited – with some exceptions – to north-western Greece and Magna Graecia.21 The actual sphere of influence of a sanctuary, therefore, did not necessarily have to be congruent with its claim to Panhellenic importance or its Panhellenic perception from outside. Therefore, the spatial and functional dimensions must be determined situationally. As a second case study, I would like to mention a specific type of suprapolis sanctuary ‒ the so-called amphictyonic sanctuaries ‒ which formed

19 20 21

See e.g. Kilian-Dirlmeier 1985. Moustakis 2006; Meyer 2013; 2015; Piccinini 2017; Malacrino, Soueref and Vecchio 2019. Lhôte 2006; Dakaris, Vokotopoulou and Christidis 2013; see also: https://dodonaonline.com/. Cf. Moustakis 2006; Piccinini 2017; Malacrino, Soueref and Vecchio 2019: esp. 97–162.

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the cultic centre of a group of neighbouring states, tribes, or other sociopolitical communities. Among the amphictyonies, the amphictyony of Delphi is the most prominent, but it is by no means the only one.22 The Delphic Sanctuary functioned not only as an amphictyonic cult-place ‒ i.e. a site of regional importance – it was at certain times also a cultic centre for Panhellenic games and an oracular site whose influence and renown extended even beyond the Greek world proper. At the same time, it maintained its importance as the site of a regionally confined polis religion. The variety of functions of the sanctuary corresponded with the variety of spatial dimensions of the sanctuaries’ spheres of influence. The case of the Athenian Panathenaia is even more complex. The distribution of Panathenaic prize amphorae leaves no doubt that the penteteric competitions gave the ‘Greater Panathenaic Games’ a Panhellenic dimension comparable to the one associated with the respective games in Olympia, Delphi, Nemea and Isthmia.23 In contrast, the annually celebrated ‘Lesser Panathenaia’ always remained exclusively a polis festival. The ‘Greater Panathenaia’ attained another status somewhere between the polis-centred and the Panhellenic dimensions at the time of the first Delian League when Athens endeavoured to move their allies ‒ in part by force ‒ to participate in the festival of the Panathenaia. By doing so, the Athenians intended to integrate further their allies, if not in a legal sense, then at least with regards to matters of cult and religion, into the fabric of the Delian League, while simultaneously strengthening the allies’ bonds with Athens.24 This is an additional dimension that must be situated somewhere between localism and Panhellenism and which must be considered separately as a unique element. I would like to restrict myself to this mosaic-like compilation of three, briefly outlined examples. They should have sufficiently demonstrated that a sanctuary is not inherently per se either polis-centred or in some way supra-regionally oriented. Instead, one and the same sanctuary could generate spaces of varying degrees of regionality and supra-regionality depending on its function. The entangled nature of religion and politics in ancient Greece resulted in the sanctuaries and cults directly reflecting the multi-layered political system of the Greek city-state world. This was an order which can ‒ neither in politicis nor in religiosis ‒ be squeezed into a

22 24

23 Funke 2013 (with further references and literature). Bentz 1998: esp. 111–16. Cf. on the Panathenaia, Deubner 1932: 22–35; Smarczyk 1990: esp. 549–92; Tracy 1991; Parker 1996: 75–76, 89–92; Shear 2001; Parker 2005: 253–69; Smarczyk 2007: esp. 217–22.

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dichotomy of polis-centrism and Panhellenism, but which was characterised by more complex differentiation.

Conclusion The starting point for my deliberations was the observation that the strict division of Greek sanctuaries into polis sanctuaries and ‘transregional’ or ‘Panhellenic’ sanctuaries has become obsolete. Such a dichotomous perspective obscures the possible diversity of Greek sanctuaries. Instead, a functional differentiation of each sanctuary is required, as the same sanctuary could often have a ‘multidimensional function’.25 Also, spatially different spheres of influence (‘Wirkungskreise’) can then be derived by determining the different functions of a sanctuary. The individual, often very complex, and multi-layered character of a Greek sanctuary can be adequately described only by a precise case-by-case identification of the prerequisites and framework conditions of these spheres of influence. The specific entanglement of functional and spatial dimensioning has to be taken into account in a comprehensive description of the multidimensional nature of sanctuaries. I can not yet offer fully developed patterns of interpretation, but perhaps at least some preliminary ideas and approaches that can help in the future to develop such patterns. Bibliography Alcock, S. E. and R. Osborne (eds.) (1994) Placing the Gods. Sanctuaries and Sacred Space in Ancient Greece. Oxford. Beck, H. (2020) Localism and the Ancient Greek City-State. Chicago, Ill. Becker, A. and P. Scholz (2004) Dissoi Logoi. Zweierlei Ansichten. Ein sophistischer Traktat. Text – Übersetzung – Kommentar. Berlin. Bentz, M. (1998) Panathenäische Preisamphoren. Eine athenische Vasengattung und ihre Funktion vom 6.–4. Jahrhundert v. Chr. Basel. Bichler, R. (2001) Herodots Welt. Der Aufbau der Historie am Bild der fremden Länder und Völker, ihrer Zivilisation und ihrer Geschichte. Berlin. Burkert, W. (1985) ‘Herodot über die Namen der Götter: Polytheismus als historisches Problem’, Museum Helveticum 42, 121–32. Cole, S. G. (1995) ‘Civic Cult and Civic Identity’, in M. H. Hansen (ed.) Sources for the Ancient Greek City-State. Symposium August, 24–27 1994, Acts of the Copenhagen Polis Centre vol. 2. Copenhagen, 292–325. 25

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Panhellenic Sanctuaries Dakaris, S., J. Vokotopoulou and A. P. Christidis (eds.) (2013) Τα Χρηστήρια Ἐλάσματα της Δωδώνης των ἀνασκαϕών Δ. Ευαγγελίδη, 2 volumes. Athens. Deubner, L. (1932) Attische Feste. Berlin. Funke, P. (2004) ‘Herodotus and the Major Sanctuaries of the Greek World’, in V. Karagheorgis and J. Taifacos (eds.) The World of Herodotus. Proceedings of an International Conference Held at the Foundation Anastasios G. Leventis, Nicosia, September 18–21, 2003 and Organized by the Foundation Anastasios G. Leventis and the Faculty of Letters, University of Cyprus. Nicosia, 159–67. (2005) ‘Die Nabel der Welt. Überlegungen zur Kanonisierung der “panhellenischen” Heiligtümer’, in T. Schmitt, W. Schmitz and A. Winterling (eds.) Gegenwärtige Antike – antike Gegenwarten. Kolloquium zum 60. Geburtstag von Rolf Rilinger. Munich, 1–16. (2006) ‘Fremde und Nicht-Bürger in den griechischen Heiligtümern der antiken Mittelmeerwelt. Eine historische Einführung’, in A. Naso (ed.) Stranieri e non cittadini nei santuari greci. Atti del convegno internazionale. Grassina, 1–12. (2009) ‘Integration und Abgrenzung. Vorüberlegungen zu den politischen Funktionen überregionaler Heiligtümer in der griechischen Staatenwelt’, Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 11, 285–97. (2013) ‘Greek Amphiktyonies: An Experiment in Transregional Governance’, in H. Beck (ed.) A Companion to Ancient Greek Government. Oxford, 451–65. (2014) ‘Überregionale Heiligtümer – Orte der Begegnung mit dem Fremden’, in R. Rollinger and K. Schnegg (eds.) Kulturkontakte in antiken Welten. Vom Denkmodell zur Fallstudie. Proceedings des internationalen Kolloquiums aus Anlass des 60. Geburtstages von Christoph Ulf, Innsbruck, 26. bis 30. Januar 2009. Leuven, Paris, and Walpole, Mass., 53–65. Hall, J. M. (2002) Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture. Chicago, Ill. Hornblower, S. (1996) A Commentary on Thucydides, volume 2. Oxford. Humphreys, S. C. (2018) Kinship in Ancient Athens: An Anthropological Analysis, 2 volumes. Oxford. Kilian-Dirlmeier, I. (1985) ‘Fremde Weihungen in griechischen Heiligtümern vom 8. bis zum Beginn des 7. Jahrhunderts v. Chr.’, Jahrbuch des RömischGermanischen Zentralmuseums Mainz 32, 215–54. Kindt, J. (2009) ‘Polis Religion – A Critical Appreciation’, Kernos 22, 9–34. (2012) Rethinking Greek Religion. Cambridge. Knäpper, K. (2018) Hieros kai Asylos. Territoriale Asylie im Hellenismus in ihrem historischen Kontext. Stuttgart. Konstan, D. (2001) ‘To Hellenikon ethnos: Ethnicity and the Construction of Ancient Greek Identity’, in I. Malkin (ed.) Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity. Cambridge, Mass., 29–50. Krauter, S. (2004) Bürgerrecht und Kultteilnahme: Politische und kultische Rechte und Pflichten in griechischen Poleis, Rom und antikem Judentum. Berlin.

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  Lepke, A. (2017) ‘Festgehalten in Stein. Die Kommunikationspotentiale griechischer Freilassungsinschriften’. PhD dissertation, Münster. Lhôte, E. (2006) Les Lamelles oraculaires de Dodone. Geneva. Linke, B. (2014) Antike Religion. Munich. Malacrino, C., K. I. Soueref and L. Vecchio (eds.) (2019) Dodonaios. L’oracolo di Zeus e La Magna Grecia. Reggio. Marinatos, N. and R. Hägg (eds.) (1993) Greek Sanctuaries: New Approaches. London. Meyer, E. A. (2013) The Inscriptions of Dodona and a New History of Molossia. Stuttgart. (2015) ‘Molossia and Epeiros’, in H. Beck and P. Funke (eds.) Federalism in Greek Antiquity. Cambridge, 297–318. Mitchell, L. G. (2007) Panhellenism and the Barbarian in Archaic and Classical Greece. Swansea. (2015) ‘The Community of the Hellenes’, in H. Beck and P. Funke (eds.) Federalism in Greek Antiquity. Cambridge, 49–65. Moustakis, N. (2006) Heiligtümer als politische Zentren. Untersuchungen zu den multidimensionalen Wirkungsgebieten von polisübergreifenden Heiligtümern im antiken Epirus. Munich. Naerebout, F. G. (2009) ‘Territorialität und griechische Religion – die aufgeteilte Landschaft’, in E. Olshausen and V. Sauer (eds.) Die Landschaft und die Religion. Stuttgarter Kolloquium zur Historischen Geographie des Altertums 9, 2005. Stuttgart, 191–214. Nesselrath, H.-G. (1999) ‘Dodona, Siwa und Herodot. Ein Testfall für den Vater der Geschichte’, Museum Helveticum 56, 1–14. Nilsson, M. P. (1957) Geschichte der griechischen Religion, volume 1, 3rd edn. Munich. Parker, R. (1996) Athenian Religion: A History. Oxford. (1998) Cleomenes on the Acropolis: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered before the University of Oxford on 12 May 1997. Oxford. (2005) Polytheism and Society at Athens. Oxford. Piccinini, J. (2017) The Shrine of Dodona in the Archaic and Classical Ages: A History. Macerata. Polignac, F. de (1995) Cults, Territory, and the Origins of the Greek City-State. Chicago, Ill. (2009) ‘Sanctuaries and Festivals’, in K. A. Raaflaub and H. van Wees (eds.) A Companion to Archaic Greece. Oxford, 427–43. Robinson, T. M. (1979) Contrasting Arguments: An Edition of the Dissoi Logoi. New York, N.Y. Rüpke, J. (1999) ‘Antike Großstadtreligion’, in C. Batsch, U. Egelhaaf-Gaiser and R. Stepper (eds.) Zwischen Krise und Alltag / Conflit et normalité: Antike Religionen im Mittelmeerraum / Religions anciennes dans l’espace méditerranéen. Stuttgart, 13–30.

Panhellenic Sanctuaries Schmitt-Pantel, P. (1990) ‘Collective Activities and the Political in the Greek City’, in O. Murray and S. Price (eds.) The Greek City: From Homer to Alexander. Oxford, 199–213. Scott, M. (2009) Delphi and Olympia: The Spatial Politics of Panhellenism in the Archaic and Classical Periods. Cambridge. Shear, J. L. (2001) Polis and Panathenaia: The History and Development of Athena’s Festival. Ann Arbor, Mich. Smarczyk, B. (1990) Untersuchungen zur Religionspolitik und politischen Propaganda Athens im Delisch-Attischen Seebund. Munich. (2007) ‘Religion und Herrschaft: Der Delisch-Attische Seebund’, Saeculum 58, 205–28. Sourvinou-Inwood, C. (2000a) ‘What Is Polis Religion?’, in R. Buxton (ed.) Oxford Readings in Greek Religion. Oxford, 13–37. (2000b) ‘Further Aspects of Polis Religion’, in R. Buxton (ed.) Oxford Readings in Greek Religion. Oxford, 38–55. Theotikou, M. (2013) Die ekecheiria zwischen Religion und Politik. Der sog. “Gottesfriede” als Instrument in den zwischenstaatlichen Beziehungen der griechischen Welt. Berlin. Tracy, S. V. (1991) ‘The Panathenaic Festival and Games: An Epigraphic Inquiry’, Nikephoros 4, 133–53. Woolf, G. (1997) ‘Polis-Religion and Its Alternatives in the Roman Provinces’, in H. Cancik and J. Rüpke (eds.) Römische Reichsreligion und Provinzialreligion. Tübingen, 71–84. Zacharia, K. (2008) ‘Herodotus’ Four Markers of Greek Identity’, in K. Zacharia (ed.) Hellenism: Culture, Identity, and Ethnicity from Antiquity to Modernity. London and New York, N.Y., 21–36.

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Epilogue: A Tribute to Potnia of the Labyrinth  

Rethinking the local horizon of Greek religion is a challenging but necessary endeavour. After two decades of fascination with Mediterranean connectivity and entangled worlds, it is worthwhile to remember that a significant part of the population in Antiquity, as well as in later periods up to the twentieth century, moved and functioned in a vital space that hardly exceeded a radius of 25 km from their home.1 This observation provides an image of a ‘small world’ that is quite different from the one recently explored by Irad Malkin. The attention paid to the local dimension is by no means a historiographical narrowing: works on globalisation and its early manifestations in Antiquity convincingly ascertained that the global– local binomial, with various variations and intermediate scales, was structurally inescapable. In other words, questioning the local dimension of Greek religion in no way means isolating idiosyncratic cultic realities and studying specific identities in restricted contexts. On the contrary, as all the contributions in this book show, it is a matter of articulating several levels of social reality, in which the local dimension fuels interactions, comparisons, differentiations, collaborations, representations, within individual and collective dynamics. In ancient Mediterranean contexts, distant in time and space, with variable unknowns and incomplete evidence, it is necessary and salutary to avoid optimistic generalisation and to carefully analyse each single situation as a social laboratory prone to elaborate creative social devices. Religion is a space of communication between people and superhuman entities, open to change and uncertainty. The local scale is, at the same time, the most evident, rich, and intricate layer for an archaeology of religious practices. The many local contexts examined in the book prove that a general appraisal of Greek religion is definitely not a sum or an amplification of local data; vice versa, the local landscapes are much more than a fragment or a scaled-down version of the global system. Each contribution provides elements that help us to understand how the whole system(s) work(s), while shedding light on the fluidity and variability of local solutions. In 376

1

See Horden and Purcell 2000; Malkin 2011; Capdetrey and Zurbach 2012.

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each context, local, ancestral, regional or translocal, general or Panhellenic, global or universal features – settings, names, images, rituals, etc. – work together. The vocabulary, both ancient and modern, testifies to the complexity of what is observed in the available evidence: literary and epigraphic sources, coins, artefacts, buildings, landscapes. The spatial dimensions of cults are so deeply embedded that I suggest putting this final journey under the patronage of the Minoan Potnia of the Labyrinth, honoured in Knossos. What exactly is this ‘local’ of which we speak? This book follows the dominant historiographical trend in the Anglo-Saxon world and beyond, which addresses what has been called ‘polis religion’ as an obsolete concept.2 According to this view, the ‘polis religion’ paradigm, which has nourished fundamental works, particularly in the French-speaking world, confined the study of religion to an excessively narrow conception of space, mainly collective and political. Consequently, as the editors write in the Preface, in a pendulum movement so frequent in science, a renewed approach is required, one that is more mindful of individual, lived, creative, experienced religious practices. ‘Polis religion’ is, however, a misleading and caricatural label to describe the orientations of Jean-Pierre Vernant, Marcel Detienne, Pauline Schmitt-Pantel and so many others’ works from the so-called French school. These scholars already paid great attention to the different settings of cults, and not only to polis religion. In an article published in 1965, in which he reviewed the 1964 publication of Clisthène l’Athénien by Pierre Lévêque and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, a very ‘political’ essay, Vernant formulates interesting considerations on the organisation and perception of space in relation to human and divine time.3 He explains Plato’s model, in the Laws, of a city organised into various spaces according to functions: the acropolis at the centre, dedicated to Zeus and Athena, flanked by Hestia. In a circular pattern, the population spreads out around this nodal space and each tribe is associated with one of the twelve gods of the pantheon, which also governs one of the twelve months of the year. The territory is also divided into twelve sections and, in the tribes, each citizen receives a plot of land in the city and a plot of land on the borders. This is of course a highly political conception of the relationship between men and gods, but it inextricably intertwines topographic, social, religious, and imaginary spaces, collective and individual parameters. Vernant’s analysis of Kleisthenes and Plato’s conceptions of the city is also based on a

2

Kindt 2009; Rüpke 2011; 2017.

3

Vernant 1965.

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previous paper (1963), where he unravelled the interactions between Hestia and Hermes, and their relationship with space, mobility, and people. I quote a brief passage from this 1963 review, now almost sixty years old: Religious thought follows its own rules of classification. It delineates and orders phenomena by distinguishing different types of agents, by comparing and contrasting various forms of activity. In this system, space and movement have not yet emerged as abstract notions. They remain implicit because they are embedded with other, more concrete and more dynamic aspects of reality. If Hestia is likely to ‘centre’ space, if Hermes can ‘mobilise’ it, it is because they rule, as divine powers, on a set of activities that concern the exploitation of the soil and the organisation of the space, which even, as a praxis, constituted the framework in which the experience of spatiality was elaborated in archaic Greece, but which nevertheless goes far beyond the field of what we call today space and movement.4

The attention placed on the experience of related gods and spaces, different forms of human and divine agency, and emic categories does not seem all too distant from our research questions today. I suggest moving beyond binary oppositions and exploring the many dimensions and horizons of ancient religions, envisaged as complex systems. This is precisely what this volume aims to do, based on stimulating case studies that approach the matter from different angles. The contributions cover multiple local landscapes in tension, hosting different dynamics, juggling networks and localisms. The fundamental contribution of these essays is precisely to challenge the reductive dichotomy between local and general, topical and Panhellenic. These oppositions, which may have some heuristic efficacy, need to be overcome in the hermeneutic phase. Just as a god is not a person, but a polyvalent divine power inscribed in a relational network, as Julia Kindt reminds us when addressing the question of the divine persona, a place is much more than just a physical space, a point or a surface. Each space refers to a whole set of sensory and cognitive features: it refers to a 4

Vernant 1963/1974: 159: ‘La pensée religieuse obéit à des règles de classification qui lui sont propres. Elle découpe et ordonne les phénomènes en distinguant différents types d’agents, en comparant et opposant des formes d’activité. Dans ce système, l’espace et le mouvement ne sont pas encore dégagés en tant que notions abstraites. Ils restent implicites parce qu’ils font corps avec d’autres aspects, plus concrets et plus dynamiques, du réel. Si Hestia apparaît susceptible de “centrer” l’espace, si Hermès peut le “mobiliser”, c’est qu’ils patronnent, comme puissances divines, un ensemble d’activités qui concernent certes l’aménagement du sol et l’organisation de l’étendue, qui même, en tant que praxis, ont constitué le cadre dans lequel s’est élaborée, en Grèce archaïque, l’expérience de la spatialité, mais qui cependant débordent très largement le champ de ce que nous appelons aujourd’hui espace et mouvement.’

Epilogue

landscape, it has a name, it evokes smells, colours, atmospheres; it is related to experiences, memories, intentions; a place is a collection of human and non-human agents – such as animals, stones, trees, objects, houses, devices – interacting; space is also made up of paths, crossroads, as well as obstacles, fords, either favouring or hindering circulation. As David Harvey reminds us, place may well be included in the short list of concepts such as ‘culture’ and ‘nature’ as one of the most complicated words in our language.5 In this respect, it is worth recalling how much this volume, which focuses on religion, owes to Hans Beck’s comprehensive reflection in Localism and the Ancient Greek City-State, a tremendous book published in 2020, which lays the foundations for a profound renewal of our understanding of localism in all its forms in ancient Greece. If space is a keyword from Harvey’s perspective, in this volume, I think the keyword must be ‘relational’. Focusing on the local dimension of religion, far from narrowing our gaze, sheds light on the extreme variety and fluidity of local cults, sometimes solidly anchored in ancestral traditions and subject to compelling nomoi, sometimes in dialogue with other times and distant spaces, or receptive to historical mutations, and embedded in translocal dynamics. Anything but autarkic. The horizon of local gods, cults, festivals, offerings always extends beyond a single place, even when they are constructed and presented as an idiosyncratic social product. Following in Irene Polinskaya’s footsteps, I have adopted the methodological oxymoron that consists in constructing a Local History of Greek Polytheism. If local religion is definitely something else and more than just the other side of Panhellenic religion, it is also time, as a corollary, to release Homer’s gods from the label of ‘Panhellenic’. It reduces the scope of the Homeric testimony of the gods to that of a literary fantasy. In the series of essays on Les dieux d’Homère,6 a group of scholars showed that the Homeric gods are not, or rather not only, the original and shared prototypes of the ‘Panhellenic’ religion mentioned by Herodotus in the Histories.7 Homer provides a relevant narrative picture of the divine powers in action, which is not altogether disconnected from local ritual contexts. Knowledge on the gods conveyed by the Homeric epic is part of a mental universe which also fuels cultic practices. The recent works of Alaya Palamidis on Apollo Smintheus8 and Miguel Herrero de Jáuregui on local

5 6 7

See Harvey 2006. Pironti and Bonnet 2017; Herrero de Jáuregui and Gagné 2019; Bonnet and Pironti 2021. 8 Hdt. 2.53. Palamidis 2019.

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gods in Homer show the porosity of these two artificially disjointed spheres.9 With these perspectives in mind, many excellent questions arise throughout the book, such as: is a local representation of a god or a goddess a conscious deviation from a norm? Is a local cultic feature a meaningful inversion of what is generally the case elsewhere in the Greek world? How do such variants relate to the general picture of a particular deity? Excellent case studies from the Peloponnesus, Sicily, Samos, Delos, Rhodes, Knossos, Attica, etc. build an overall framework that does justice to the richness of religious practices and imaginaries. To quote Hans Beck, ‘Greek religion was more than the addition of local fragmentation, pieced together from local systems.’10 The longue durée perspective of the enquiry enables us to emphasise the power of renewal that derives from cities and villages, associations and families, faced with crises, alliances, opportunities, and mutations. All too often, localism is given as a synonym for conservatism, whereas each community’s capacity for adaptation and inventiveness is effectively portrayed in the book. In Rhodes, for example, a citizen called Nikasion founded a koinon, a cultic association, and could not resist the temptation of calling the members ‘Asklapiastai Nikasioneioi Olympiastai’, using his own name, his wife’s name, Olympias, and the standard version of a group of Asklepios devotees, Asklapiastai. This curious designation is a mixture of references to intertwined horizons. The very local, even intimate scope of the name also refers to a Panhellenic god. Spatial benchmarks need to be considered at more than one level in order to fully understand how local and translocal work together. Like names, things also reflect intricate logics of creation, tradition, innovation, imitation, reception, etc. Ritual landscapes and settings, cultic devices for the interaction between human and superhuman beings, assemblages of offerings, movements and gestures within different kinds of spaces, illustrate a sophisticated grammar of relations and agencies. Objects always come from a place and have a local matrix, but they often travel, changing in destination and significance; they have a story, a biography; they tell us about norms and exceptions, habitus and distinction; they materialise different horizons, identities and communities. The issue of what a local identity is and how cults embody it is at the very core of the book. ‘If I am a Lindian, so what?’, could be the question asked by a citizen living in Rhodes after the synoikism, when making an offering to

9

Herrero de Jáuregui 2021.

10

See Chapter 1, p. 31.

Epilogue

Athena Lindia. Local belonging is constantly renegotiated and enshrined in different social and spatial frameworks. For Meleager of Gadara, who ironically launched the debate by asking, in his own funerary epigram,11 ‘If I am a Syrian, so what?’, it should not be a thauma, a ‘surprise’, even a ‘wonder’ that someone born in Gadara was able to be so proficient in Greek poetry. And Meleager adds: ‘The only homeland, stranger, is the world which we inhabit; one Chaos has begotten all mortals’ (μίαν, ξένε, πατρίδα κόσμον ναίομεν: ἓν Θνατοὺς πάντας ἔτικτε Χάος). Hans Beck, in Megarian Moments, already echoed this amazing formula, while Irene Polinskaya, in this volume, appropriately reminds us that: ‘Since Greek communities typically included people from other locations, the social texture of the local was subject to varying degrees of cultural diversity.’12 Moreover, the fascinating and critical reassessment of the local dimension of Greek religion fits into an inspiring scientific context, characterised by different projects which renew our understanding of ancient religious dynamics. I can think of at least three recent or ongoing research projects that are part of a collective movement to energise and spur the study of religions as complex systems embedded in multi-scalar historical and social environments. First of all, the Lived Ancient Religion project (LAR), which was directed by Jörg Rüpke in Erfurt.13 Neither restricted to everyday religion nor focused on subjective and individual experiences, this approach aimed to overcome the dichotomy between official and institutionalised religion, on the one hand, and lived or experienced religion, on the other. The numerous and fruitful investigations conducted by the LAR team emphasised various forms of appropriation and showed ‘religions in the making’ with various degrees of coherence and embeddedness in the social practices aiming to communicate with the divine. The second project which provides a stimulating background for the study of the local dimension of Greek religion is entitled Unlocking Sacred Landscapes.14 This inter-disciplinary research network based in Cyprus and Dublin offers a diachronic study of the temporality, spatiality and materiality of Mediterranean sacred landscapes. The concept of landscape insightfully takes on board the dual dimension of concrete and imaginary settings for rituals. Inter- and intra-site spatial analysis makes it possible to investigate and hook together political, social, economic, and religious

11 13 14

12 Anth. Pal. 7.417. Beck 2018. Final report (2012–17): https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/295555/reporting/fr; Gasparini 2020. See the website of the project: www.ucy.ac.cy/unsala/; Papantoniou, Morris and Vionis 2019; Papantoniou et al. 2019.

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dynamics, as expressed in material landscapes and spaces. Beyond institutions and structures, the Unlocking Sacred Landscapes project considers human experiences and performances within the framework of rituals, where objects, music, light, scent and gestures are used to interact with invisible, powerful entities. Much like the present volume, the unlocked approach of religious contexts combines micro-, meso-, and macro-site analysis and all sorts of evidence, with a particular focus on new digital methodologies. The third project I would like to mention is the ERC Mapping Ancient Polytheisms. Cult Epithets as an Interface between Religious Systems and Human Agency (MAP), that I have led in Toulouse since October 2017.15 It deals with the different ways ancient Mediterranean societies, especially the Greek and West-Semitic on a long-term scale (ca. 1000 BCE–400 CE), named their gods and used a large set of onomastic elements. Using numerous variable combinations, people shaped, in specific local contexts, such as a city, a kingdom, a tribe, a region, or a sanctuary, complex and fluid divine powers. Shared onomastic elements reveal functional collaborations between the gods, but also networks of cults in close and distant spaces. Naming and mapping are closely related in the MAP database, which sheds light on social agents and cultural creativity, determined locally but sometimes reverberating globally. In all of these scientific ventures, the religious field is explored as a space of experimentation in which human action is moved by strategies, between norms and appropriation. All of these issues similarly irrigate this volume on the local horizons of ancient Greek religion. I will conclude with two brief examples of the many facets of localism. This book is focused on the Greek world. Yet there is a considerable amount of interesting evidence in the territories situated on the margins of what the Greeks themselves perceived as the centre. During the Hellenistic period, the borders of the Greek world expanded considerably; goods, people, gods, ideas and practices moved intensively from one shore of the Mediterranean space to another. This historical transformation gave rise to many fascinating and creative cultural processes. The perception of space changed and the social imaginary was affected by the integration of new horizons in the Greek world. To take an example, in Wadi Bir el-Ain,

15

See the website: https://map-polytheisms.huma-num.fr/; Bonnet et al. 2018 and 2019; Lebreton and Bonnet 2019; Bonnet et al. 2021. MAP database: https://base-map-polytheisms.huma-num .fr/login.

Epilogue

about 100 km north of Luxor, the Greek god Pan was called Euodos,16 ‘of the good road/journey’, by those who moved through the desert: merchants, soldiers, or pilgrims. The hunters who also frequented the desert called the god Oreibates,17 ‘the one who travels in the mountain(s), ranger of the mountain(s)’, although the only mountains there were the sand dunes. When invoking the god with this name, the local hunters most probably imagined themselves immersed in the Arkadian valleys, dear to the Greek god, pursuing deer. In the desert, so far from the green and steep paths of Arkadia, the local epithet of Pan conveys a rich mnemotopic spatial imaginary. Oreibates amazingly connects two distant local backgrounds, but also the time of the gods and that of men. Many other cases would confirm that the margins of the Greek world were creative laboratories, hosts to ingenious cultural appropriations and complex cultic messages. The same Pan, or more precisely, another local guise of Pan, appears in the sacrificial regulation of Marmarini, in Thessaly.18 He is explicitly mentioned as the Greek equivalent of a mysterious Syrian god called Neiriples. Here too, between 225 and 150 BCE, in the territory of an unknown city near Larisa, a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural community adopted complex ritual prescriptions, involving many divine entities, ritual acts, festivals, and a common calendar. The goddess Moira is first honoured ‘before the Eloulaia’ (Side A, § 1, a festival with a Semitic name). The text refers to initiates, dances, musical instruments, and then to the gods Helios and Pan ‘whom the Syrians call Neiriples’ who receive various offerings. For Pan, fish and pigeon are prohibited. Other gods are honoured in the following days and months, like Adara and Lilla, who bear foreign names, Artemis Phylake and Apollo Pylouchos, who are well-known in the Greek epigraphic corpus. A whole series of provisions relate to initiates. Side B of the same document states that ‘into the temple of the goddess a non-initiate must not enter’ (§ 1). Among a multitude of prescriptions, the mention of a sacrifice ἑλληνικῶι νόμωι is particularly remarkable: ‘If anyone wishes to sacrifice to the goddess according to the Hellenic custom, it is possible (to sacrifice) whatever one wants except swine (lit. a piglet)’ (§ 7). In Thessaly, even before the third century BCE, a large Near Eastern 16

17 18

On Pan Euodos in his sanctuary of El-Kanais in the eastern desert, see I.Kanais 2 (I.Égypte métriques 158), 10, 13, 21, 22, 27, 28, 36, 37, 38, 43, 44, 47, 50, 54, 61, 62, 72, 78, 88. In the same place the god is also called Euagros, ‘Of the good hunt’: I.Kanais 8 (I.Égypte métriques 164), 26, 29, 66. I.Pan du désert, 1 and 4. Cf. CGRN (http://cgrn.ulg.ac.be/file/225/), A, 9–10. On the enigmatic name Neiriples, see the commentary in CGRN, with previous bibliography.

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community had begun to put down roots. Thus, different kinds of nomoi cohabited in the sanctuary: Greek and non-Greek. The local goddess, and all the Gods of this place, Greek and non-Greek, were used to welcome both Greek and non-Greek worshippers and practices. The sacrificial regulation aims to organise and clarify the cultic framework, but it does not separate local and non-local gods and rituals, which often appear together. In such a context, the notion of local tends to blur into something translocal, poikilos, where different deities and practices were encapsulated in a multi-cultural framework and self-managed space. Significantly, the text contains only one reference to a sacrifice made ‘in the Greek manner’ (ἑλληνικῶι νόμωι), which corresponds to the pragmatic necessity to categorise and label different sacrificial norms within a cultic middle ground. In other words, the Marmarini inscription does not refer, with this category, to a Panhellenic horizon but rather to a local Greek one. When Herodotus, in a famous passage in Book 8 of the Histories, refers to the nature and consistency of τὸ Ἑλληνικόν, and includes in it ‘the kinship of all Greeks, blood and speech, and the shrines of gods and the sacrifices that we have in common, and the likeness of our way of life’, he is not defining a concept of Greek or Panhellenic religion.19 He echoes a specific Athenian discourse in a very peculiar historical and rhetorical context. Athens, faced with the Persian threat and the Spartan temptation to stop resisting, pretends to be the champion of Hellenism, a concept conceived as a set of values, especially freedom, as an antonym of Achaemenid despotism. As Jean-Claude Carrière states: ‘they reject the offer to become the Phoenicians of Greece and declare eternal war on the King. And to the mediocre Hellenic sentiments of the Spartans, they oppose a firm and clear spatio-temporal definition of Hellenism – “same blood, same language, common sanctuaries and sacrifices, same customs”.’20 There are many different ways of being Greek or being local, or both, for men and gods. By scrutinising the local horizon of ancient Greek religion the authors assembled in this volume tackle a fundamental issue for the understanding of ancient religions as complex systems, and they pave the way for future investigations on the labyrinthic nature of religious practices in ancient Greece.

19 20

Hdt. 8.144. On these issues, see Pirenne-Delforge 2020. Carrière 1988: 258: ‘ils rejettent l’offre de devenir les Phéniciens de la Grèce et déclarent au Roi une guerre éternelle. Et aux médiocres sentiments helléniques des Spartiates, ils opposent une définition spatio-temporelle ferme et claire de l’hellénisme – “même sang, même langue, sanctuaires et sacrifices communs, mêmes mœurs”.’

Epilogue

Bibliography Beck, H. (2018) ‘If I am from Megara. Introduction to the Local Discourse Environment of an Ancient Greek City-State’, in H. Beck and P. J. Smith (eds.), Megarian Moments. The Local World of an Ancient Greek City-State. Teiresias Supplements Online, 15–45. (2020) Localism and the Ancient Greek City-State. Chicago, Ill. Bonnet, C. et al. (2018) ‘Les dénominations des dieux nous offrent comme autant d’images dessinées (Julien, Lettres 89b, 291b). Repenser le binôme théonyme-épithète’, Studi e materiali di storia delle religioni 4, 567–91. (2019) ‘Mapping Ancient Gods: Naming and Embodiment beyond Anthropomorphism. A Survey of the Field in Echo to the Books of M. S. Smith and R. Parker’, Mediterranean Historical Review 34, 207–20. (2021) Noms de dieux. Portraits de divinités antiques. Toulouse. Bonnet, C. and G. Pironti (eds.) (2021) Les dieux d’Homère III. Attributs onomastiques. Liège. Capdetrey, L. and J. Zurbach (eds.) (2012) Mobilités grecques. Mouvements, réseaux, contacts en Méditerranée, de l’époque archaïque à l’époque hellénistique. Bordeaux. Carrière, J. C. (1988) ‘Oracles et prodiges de Salamine. Hérodote et Athènes’, Dialogues d’histoire ancienne 14, 219–75. Gasparini V. et al. (eds.) (2020) Lived Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean World: Approaching Religious Transformations from Archaeology, History and Classics. Berlin and Boston, Mass. Harvey, D. (2006) ‘Space as a Keyword’, in N. Castree and D. Gregory (eds.), David Harvey: A Critical Reader. Malden, Mass., 270–94. Herrero de Jáuregui, M. (2021) ‘Les épithètes toponymiques des dieux dans l’Iliade’, in C. Bonnet and G. Pironti (eds.) Les dieux d’Homère III. Attributs onomastiques. Liège, 191–208. Herrero de Jáuregui, M. and R. Gagné (eds.) (2019) Les dieux d’Homère II. Anthropomorphismes. Liège. Horden, P. and N. Purcell (2000) The Corrupting Sea. A Study of Mediterranean History. Oxford. Kindt, J. (2009) ‘Polis Religion – A Critical Appreciation’, Kernos 22, 9–34. Lebreton, S. and C. Bonnet (2019) ‘Mettre les polythéismes en formules? À propos de la base de données Mapping Ancient Polytheisms’, Kernos 32, 267–96. Malkin, I. (2011) A Small Greek World: Networks in the Ancient Mediterranean. Oxford. Palamidis, A. (2019) ‘Des souris et des homes’, Kernos 32, 191–236. Papantoniou, G., C. E. Morris and A. K. Vionis (2019) Unlocking Sacred Landscapes: Spatial Analysis of Ritual and Cult in the Mediterranean. Nicosia. Papantoniou, G. et al. (2019) Unlocking Sacred Landscapes: Digital Humanities and Ritual Space. Berlin.

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Pirenne-Delforge, V. (2020) Le polythéisme grec à l’épreuve d’Hérodote, new online ed. Paris. Pironti, G. and C. Bonnet (eds.) (2017) Les dieux d’Homère. Polythéisme et poésie en Grèce ancienne. Liège. Rüpke, J. (2011) ‘Lived Ancient Religion: Questioning “Cults” and “Polis Religion”’, Mythos 5, 191–204. (2017) ‘Una prospettiva individualizzata sulla religione antica’, Mythos 11, 145–55. Vernant, J.-P. (1965) ‘Espace et organisation politique en Grèce ancienne’, Annales. Economies, sociétés, civilisations 20, 576–95. (1963/1974) ‘Hestia-Hermès. Sur l’expression religieuse de l’espace et du mouvement chez les Grecs’, L’Homme 3, 12–50, republished in J.-P. Vernant, Mythe et pensée chez les Grecs. Étude de psychologie historique. Paris 1974, 155–201 (the latter is cited).

Index

Acrocorinth 150–75 Adrastos 317 Aigina 20, 44, 332 Aischylos 35 Akragas 215–17, 247–48 Alpheios 37, 354–55 Amyklai 331 Andania 117 Anubis 302–3 Aphrodite 7, 40, 56, 194, 297–98 Apollo 7–11, 34–35, 51–53, 79, 86, 383 Sanctuary of at Amyklai 331 Sanctuary of on Delos 291–93 Sanctuary of at Delphi 18, 51–53, 366–67, 371 Sanctuary of at Didyma 38–40, 126 Sanctuary of at Kalapodi 126, 144–45 Sanctuary of at Thebes 34–35, 41–42, 350 Ares 79, 86–87 Temple of at Hermione 194–95 Argos 112–13, 123, 130, 188, 347–51 Ascalon 297–98 Asklepios 128, 253–54, 356–57, 380 associations 252–54, 298–300, 305 Astarte 297–98, 299–300 Artemis 79, 93, 110, 112, 119, 158–59, 199, 323–24, 326–27, 383 Sanctuary of at Ephesos 120–21, 126, 323–24 Sanctuary of at Kalapodi 126, 144–45 Sanctuary of at Skillous 321–29 Athena 6, 8, 79, 86, 255, 265–66 and Panathenaia 126, 221, 251, 371 Sanctuary of on Chios 157 Sanctuary of at Lindos 236–51, 264–84 Sanctuary of on Mt Kynthos 294–96 Athens 15, 51–53, 86, 126, 209–12, 218–22, 314–16, 328, 331–32, 348, 365, 371, 384 Athenians on Delos 295–96, 303 Attica 157, 212–13, 330–32, 318–21 see also Athens

Bendis 328, 331–32 Berytos 293, 299–300 Bintliff Diameter 45 Bitalemi 217 Boiotia 34–35, 40–41, 349–52 see also Thebes burials, see tombs Chios 157 Christianity 30, 308, 334–39 choral performance 41–43, 110, 317 coming-of-age rituals 14, 59–60, 110, 112–13, 123 Corinth 127, 155 see also Acrocorinth Crete, see Dikte, Knossos cult access(ibility) 155, 190, 193, 209–10, 214–15, 224, 251, 269, 276, 283, 293, 369–70 cult activity see offerings, processions, sacrifice cult foundations 112–13, 195, 314–30, 350, 363, 370 cult longevity 90–94, 300, 308, 319–21 cult officials, see priests Daidalos 90–92 deities, epithets of 7–8, 34–35, 86, 106–8, 197–99, 325–26 Egyptian 15, 128, 300–6 Greek concepts of 3, 105–6 localism of 7–16, 20–23, 34–39, 129–30, 160–61, 185, 300–6, 379–80 Minoan 87, 92–93 Mycenaean 47–48, 79–80, 85–87, 90–94, 107 see also Greek religion, human-divine relationships Delos 51–53, 290–308 Delphi 18, 51–53, 366–67, 371 Demeter 162–64, 187–201, 205–27 and Thesmophoria 117, 205–27 Sanctuary of on the Acrocorinth 150–75

387

388

Index

Demeter (cont.) Sanctuary of at Eleusis 200, 213, 367 Sanctuary of at Hermione 40, 186–201 Didyma 38–40, 126 Dikte, Mt 90–91 Dione / di-wi-ja 79–80, 87 Dionysia 221 Dionysos 42, 79, 112, 317, 350 Dodona 363, 370 Eleusis 200, 213, 367 Elis 353–57 Ephesos 119, 126, 323–24 Ephoros 51–53 epichoric informants, see local sources Epidauros 356–57 epithets, epicleseis, see deities, epithets of

Hagia Triada sarcophagus 94–97 Halimus 212–13 Helios 234, 274, 266 Hephaistos 79 Hera 14, 20–21, 79, 106–31, 159, 164–65 Sanctuary of at Argos 112–13, 123, 130, 188 Sanctuary of at Perachora 147–50, 153–75 Sanctuary of on Samos 112–14, 121–29, 165 Herakles 42, 192–93, 243, 298, 355–57 Hermes 79, 94, 197, 378 Hermione 40, 186–201 Herodotus 11, 29, 316–18, 348, 363, 366, 370, 384 Hestia 378 Homer 6–7, 9, 110, 245, 353–57, 379–80 Horon 298 human-divine relationships, 41–43, 154, 159–68, 306, 313–28, 332–39 see also cult activity Hyettos 40–41 Hymettos, Mt 157 Hydreios 304–6 hymns, see choral performance

Gaia 38 Gela 217, 247–48 general, the, see ‘Panhellenism’ gods and goddesses see deities graves see tombs Greek myth and ritual 108–13, 116–17, 211, 214, 226 and Mycenaean continuities 91–92 localism of 14, 51, 55, 194–95, 214, 244–45, 346–48, 353–57 Greek religion and non-Greeks 11, 119–20, 130, 150, 156, 222, 247–48, 297–308, 369–70, 381–84 and Mycenaean continuities 79–80, 85–87, 90–92, 107 and the polis xiii, 16–17, 31, 262–63, 364–65, 377 comparative approaches to 119–20, 332–39 (dis)belief in 8 embeddedness of 16, 19, 29–31, 253–54, 381 history of scholarship on 5, 10–11, 14–23, 119–20, 208, 377–82 localism, concept of in xiii, 2, 19–24, 29–43, 201–2, 205–8, 220–22, 262–63, 293–94, 296–97, 312–14, 330–32, 342–43, 358–59, 368–72, 376–84 nature of xiii, 1, 11–24, 29–43 see also cult activity, deities, human-divine relationships, ‘Panhellenism’

Kalapodi 126, 144–45 Kalaureia 46–57, 332 Kameiros 245, 277–80 Kephisos River 314–15 Klymenos 192–95 Kleisthenes 316–18 Knossos 70–74, 84–98 Kolias 212–13 Kore 14, 130, 162–64, 187, 191–95, 198, 200 and the Thesmophoria 117, 205–27 Sanctuary of on the Acrocorinth 150–75 Sanctuary of at Lokroi 14, 40 Kynthos, Mt 294–96

Hades 14, 191–95 Sanctuary of at Eleian Pylos 353–56

Labyrinth at Knossos 90–92 Lindian Chronicle 236–48, 253–54

Iamneia 298 iconography 9, 14, 72–75, 81–83, 88–90, 94–97, 266 Imbrasos River 108–9 initiation, see coming-of-age rituals insularity 43–60, 290–93, 333–34 Isis 187, 300–6, 308 Ismenion at Thebes 34–35, 41–42, 350 Isthmia 144–46, 153–75

Index

Lindos 236–51, 264–84 local sources 195–96, 240–44, 344–45, 358–59 localism see deities; Greek myth; Greek religion; local sources Lokroi 14 lustral basins 77–78, 88 lygos tree 115–20 Melanippos 316–18 Messenia 117, 349–52 Meter 38, 80 Miletos 38–40 Minoan religion 69–70, 77–78, 81–83, 87–97 Mycenae 81–82 Mycenaean religion 47–48, 67–98, 107 Naxos 332–39 Nestor, Neleus 353–56 networks 33, 251–53, 280, 343–44, 353, 368–72, 381 Nile River 304–6 nymphs 39, 42, 113, 314, 319–21 Olympia 18–19, 144–45, 185, 357, 367 offerings 78–80, 86–87, 90–91, 123, 127–29, 142–68, 217, 238–47, 272–73 Orpheus 198 Osiris 305 Pan 315–16, 383–84 Panathenaia 126, 221, 251, 371 ‘Panhellenism’ xiii, 2, 9–13, 18–19, 205–7, 346, 365–72, 379–80 Parnes, Mt 144–45, 157 Pausanias 29, 186, 189–90, 195–96, 344–47 Pa-ze / pa-de 87, 92 Perachora 147–50, 153–75 Persephone see Kore Pindar 41–42 place and space 32, 36–37, 184–85, 342–43, 349–52, 378–79 Plataia 35–36 Plato 364–65, 377 polis religion, see Greek religion and the polis Polyainos 116, 215 Poseidon 47–52, 54–55, 56–60, 79, 86, 164–65, 246 Sanctuary of at Isthmia 144–46, 153–75 Sanctuary of at Kalaureia 46–57, 332 Sanctuaries on Delos 297–98, 299–300 Potnia 79, 86, 90–92, 94 prayer, see choral performance

priests, priestesses 125, 190, 242, 245, 250–51, 254–55, 269, 281 processions 38–40, 72–75, 117, 189–90, 332 Pylos (Elis) 353–57 Pylos (Messenia) 74–76, 79–80, 82–83, 353–57 Rhodes 232–55, 263–86 Roma (goddess) 299–300 Samos 106–31, 165 sacrifice of animals 80, 97, 125–27, 190–91, 211–12, 297–99, 306–7, 383–84 Saronic Gulf 43–60 see also Isthmia Serapis 15, 300–6 Sicily 213–24, 247–48 Sikyon 316–18 Skillous 321–29 space, see place and space Sparta 35–36, 112, 127, 198, 322, 330–32, 384 Sphairia 59 Strabo 51–53, 327, 354–57 Syracuse 215–18, 223 Tainaron 50 Thebes 34–35, 41–42, 349–52 Thera 321 Thesmophoria 117, 205–27 Thessaly 356–57 Thucydides 35–36, 322 tombs 68–69, 82, 94–97, 155, 346–48, 355 Toneia 111–21, 123–24 translocation of cults 85–87, 246, 293–94, 296–99, 299–300, 308, 316–18, 326–29, 356, 383–84 Troizen 54–60, 348 universal, the see ‘Panhellenism’ Underworld, entrances to the 192–93 Vari Cave 318–21 votives, see offerings weaponry, as cult offerings 123, 144–45, 158–59, 164–65 Xenophon 321–29 Zeus 7–8, 56, 79, 87, 90–91, 107, 110, 197 Sanctuary of at Dodona 363, 370 Sanctuary of on Mt Kynthos 294–96 Sanctuary of on Mt Parnes 144–45, 157 Sanctuary of at Olympia 18–19, 144–45, 185, 357, 367

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